he published more than 2000 works in various legal journals. to his left is natella boltyanskaya, a journalist and columnist featured in various magazines from 1991 until present. she has hosted numerous radio and television programs. she is the author of "parallels, peoples, and events." she was awarded the laureate prize of moscow for contributions to the human rights deal of 2014. she is currently hosted by moscow radio and a columnist from the newspapers. she is currently working on a project with international support. , we have stanislav kucher in town briefly and we

are lucky to have him here. a russian liberal journalist, tv host, and filmmaker. he is editor in chief of multimedia projects around the world. he is the host of a monthly talkshow, a roundtable. chief of the national geographic traveler's, russian edition. he received a number of professional awards. this was not shown on russian tv. 2002 through 2004, he was host of the 25th hour, which was suspended eventually. political advisor to mikael prokhorov.

, he serves as a member of the presidential council for civil society and human rights. last, but not least, nikolai zlobin, the founder of cgi in 2012. advisor to president gorbachev and boris yeltsin. he has been associated with a variety of top institutions and has served as the go-between between the american policy and economic community focused on russia. well-published in english and russian. most importantly, he serves as an interpreter of russian culture. with that, i will turn it over to nikolai and he can begin the conversation. mr. zlobin: thank you. we will start with my right, mr.

stanislav kucher. i think we will have three of them speaking and then a question and answer session. the floor is yours. nikolai.r: thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. i am looking forward to this part of questions and answers because i do like informal communication. believe it is most unique to answer the questions you are actually interested in. if i do have to make certain statements, i would like to say what i think about the future of describe three scenarios for the future of russia for the next few years. i would like to start with a quote. ofyears ago, in the pages foreign affairs, then attorney

general of the united states warned about what would happen if perestroika failed. the primary problem before the soviet people and their leaders is to prevent the new soviet union from becoming a version of the autocratic monarchy and to foster instead the political curlers and -- pluralism reflected in the rule of law and respect for human rights. what he foresaw happened precisely. that generation of russian reformers failed. we are witnesses of this right now. the current elites in moscow off andly because autocracy.tin they realize what they did to their predecessors, what they did to replace the yeltsin era.

what theremembered yeltsin era elites did to replace the soviet era elites. that was persecution, exile, confiscation. for that reason, there is a very powerful inertia for them to do whatever is in their power not to change anything. so they would not themselves be subject to prosecution, persecution, exile, and confiscation. that is why what they are doing today is they are doing anything to forestall the day when something would change for them. created, whaty they call the vertical of power, actually does not work. it has led russia where it is now. , whatge economic crisis

we call the bite of the bulldogs under the carpet, meaning the , the putinen elites elites are beginning to understand that if nothing is done, this will lead to the replacement in a more or less violent way. they will be replaced in exactly the same way as they had been reset -- replaced previously. one of the scenarios for russian afford --n be done to to avoid the worst. the first scenario that i see and i'm not the only one here, let's call it elimination under putin. i mean both the economy and domestic political life.

well thererfectly was a brezhnev stagnation period . that period is admired by a lot of russians especially, the older generation and retirees. ofy remember it as a time stability, but not prosperity. what they do not realize is that the stagnation under brezhnev had the higher oil prices. the stagnation under putin is different. the substitution has so far been less successful than medvedev's innovations. is getting worse and worse.

more and more people are recognizing that. putin has built an economic system of vertical integration where any initiative outside the notmes complete control is -- is an automatic threat and is treated as such. directly or indirectly, members of the putin team control every ,art of the russian economy including small and medium-sized enterprises. know, buture if you there was a discussion of moscow's street kiosks in february of this year. underlinedion just the tendency.

and the classic refrain of small and medium-sized businesses, you do not need to help us, just don't bother us. like theunds revolutionary slogan. something pretty close to revolution in today's russia. official in the putin administration once said that without putin, there is no russia. the thesis of the putin period, any criticism of the regime, no matter where , business people, doctors, teachers, truck drivers, from wherever, will be

either silence from the budget or mistreated as a provocation from the west and treated as such with all the consequences. fault of thed the putin regime. what i forces under stagnation is the elites will continue to regularlyg themselves and publicly declaring their ,ove and loyalty to putin swearing on their willingness to fall on a grenade in the fight against external or internal enemies. chechnya, theof

russian fsb, and russian agencies like the minister of internal affairs, have been playing this game for years. with many corpses to show for it. as the budget shrinks. pressure will be in campaigns from time to time against corruption, which will be initiated by corrupt deputies or officers. there will be some sacrifices. wanted aaucrats who big piece of the pie will probably be shown to the public. but not really high-ranking or influential public figures. also, as the stagnation continues and the pie becomes

smaller and smaller, i am sure that certain conflicts will become public. since putin is used to this role as arbiter who solves all arguments between the elites, sometimes, when it comes to public and when the scandal can reflect on putin's image, then probably some serious figures will need to be sacrificed. of putin's most treasured traits is his lordy. he says that he never gives up his people. of course, he will continue to defend his people. at some point, when the conflicts become public, the combination of scandal as

shortage is likely to create a situation where a member of his team must be sacrificed for real. and not just with kid gloves, as was the former defense minister. yes, putin has all the resources to remain in power until 2018 and through 2018 at the very least. he will not down protests with a combination of withered carrots fix. well-financed people will buy that. the confrontation with the west will continue. the worst thing about this stagnation scenario is that it will eventually lead to the the most violent ways. one of the most violent ways that can happen is if they force

comes to power. what forces am i talking about? the community of january 25, which was created on generate 25th of this year, headed by no other than eager here can -- igor gyurkin. guys, some other including a famous russian writer and some politicians from , saidus administrations that they criticized hard both clinton and the administration and they said that what putin is doing, his people are committing suicide in front of everybody. on the other hand, they also criticize western liberals because they believe they sold themselves to the state department.

they are notised afraid of parallels with the 1970 -- the 1917 bolsheviks. they said we will come to power in a way that the bolsheviks came to power. many people ino russia had even heard of the bolsheviks. within a year, they took power and turned the world upside down. guys claim they will rid russia of corruption. they will unite russians separated by borders. this can hardly be done without the use of military force. so this is probably the worst scenario, which is pretty bad for both the easiest elites and the liberal opposition. i guess i am running out of my

time right now, so i would be happy to answer your questions as to what i believe needs to be done to avoid the worst scenarios when my turn comes to answer your questions. ms. bolyanskaya: i visited a museum and so either interesting quote. about the we talk situation in russia, the media is also part of society. anything thatll is not in common.

radio and tv, newspapers. of course, we have internet around all of these parts. we have several state channels. some of the jokes are that all of them are state channels. they will try to tell you some details of the content of our state channels. girl,remember a raped boy, and shadows of the skin of the grandfathers of other girls. here are the things that people say from the streets. they got another page of the story of the media, the russians invade crimea. of -- what was

the reaction of society when the soviet troops invaded czechoslovakia? he answered, you cannot imagine. the propaganda was more or less the russian propaganda. i am not a user of state channel. i do not want to answer what channel i watch now. but the situation with the internet is so that every interesting article, every interesting film you can find on the internet and social networks somewhere else. modern state channels often you some products from the internet. it is some kind of circle. by way of the very big mediaence from the soviet , every event is shown on the

internet. so you can understand everything as it goes. when they have the street action in russia, people look like this. can understand everything that is going. why. will ask ourselves they don't want to take care. so entertainment media, sometimes they make some kind of awful things. audience that everything is going right. they speak about our troops in the ukraine. they say that we are right and here in washington, my colleague from the kennan institute

visited the ukraine and people have no hands, no feet in the hospitals. they are victims. when we speak about conflict between you came -- ukraine and russia, it is not a conflict, it is a war. we have radio station demonstrations which are well-known. representative of well-known radio. it seems to me when our editors in chief are asked why putin leaves you, they have several reasons. the first reason, they should get some use. reason is that we need some showcase if a person

from the west comes to moscow and asks where the freedom of broadcasting company was. reason, radio has no meaning as a source of propaganda when there are elections in russia, you can see the people who will be our politics on any channel. people from a position and they do not have enough audience to get their voices for voting. it will be not true if i say there is no freedom of media in russia.

there is freedom of media, but sometimes, they have a vera -- a very narrow audience. there are some media, the derry journal -- the daily journal, that are now forbidden in russia. .nd there is one small detail in 1975, for instance, if somebody accused the personal spreading information, he would prove it. restrict media without any setbacks. so when you are in washington, britain, europe, you can find this very website no problem.

if you try to open them from russia, it is not a simple procedure. what about radio? that,some of you remember several months ago, there was a conflict. the reason of the conflict was the twitter of one of our journalists. they tried to fire this gentleman. when he said that it is his prerogative to do it, he refused to do it. thing a very interesting when the people from some other

structure tried to make independent journalists do something. you cannot say that there are no independent journalists in russia. maybe you are right. it seems it was a soviet songwriter who said, tell me who tries to influence you and i will answer who pays you. with the situation media in russia is rather set. there are some restrictions of getting information. my date friends, i do not understand how they work because they have their own list of victims. that they are journalists and do a lot of things to do

their real job. but the job is difficult in russia. i know who i invited to kremlin. not exactly to kremlin, but sometimes, people try to meet them. there was a journalist who got a call from federal special service and he said, i want to meet you. but i do not want to meet you, he said. you are not right. we will offer you exclusive information and you will be proud of it she said that she does not like it. she was told the next day that they will come to her and do a rummage. she began to clean her house and she found very interesting things. decided that she will

be afraid of them no more. so i know some people who i invited who are the figures of crusading. i know this is difficult for them. i also know the situation's connected with novak a couple of years ago. he took one of the journalists in the fourth and he said, i will kill you and investigate your information. journalists, we went to the building of his and we wanted to .ake some actions we had no time to do our work

because all of us were arrested. ladies and gentlemen, it was not the order of alphabet. it was some wish of those people. that we had a semblance of those people who will go to protest. this for ating in couple of hours. of course, we understood nothing bad would happen to us. but sometimes, journalists, especially from internet media, sometimes they have broken devices. and so it seems to me that there

everyway out because russian person has the ability to get any information from the media, from the internet. but nobody does anything because i think the number of protesters is very small. emigrate.e had to familya member of my own who worked on the elections several times and participated in this. he was arrested six or seven times. the next time, he will be in prison. ,hen he emigrated from russia he understood that in israel, there were hundreds of thousands

of people. some of them were trying to go to european countries. it seems to me that it looks philosophers and intellectuals are leaving russia. man whoa rumor that a emigrated from russia, every month, in paris, they have some consultations. they want to ask some questions. my question is, why is either? the wholeo me that direction in which the whole isiety and media among them not -- thank you. mr. ryzhov: ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

nikolai, thank you for this possibility to address to you people these crucial topics on human rights. maybe some of my words will not audience,ood by the but sorry. i'm not going to talk too much, because i prefer leading dialogue and questions. here, i jusas going t enumerated at least nine topics that i'm going to address to you. the whole list of human rights problems in russia, but it came to my mind. and maybe the

-- theights issue is human rights trial. you may know, as she was sentenced to 22 years of prison arm, and last week, it was roundtable at the canon institute, and i sensed that i had some doubts that they're exchange officers of russian intelligence because, you know, she's pretty much -- is aas pretty much -- she member of parliament, a delegate to the parliament of europe. she's a hero of russia.

those officers of intelligence, it's russian officials. they went there on their own will. they were not officials. there would be no exchange. at the same time, mr. kerry was in moscow, and he had a four-hour speech with l aborov, and that question was also discussed. was a preposition by russian government, as they say, totale exchange her for

amnesty for all rebels and fighters. read that the american government wouldn't accept. it is very strange, because russia talks with the united states about her. not with the ukrainian government. position -- it is my personal opinion that putin's position on ukraine -- it is a puppet manipulated by the united states government. he prefers to talk with the united states, not ukraine. that is the problem of due watched -- i know the

,arristers who protected her but the judge refused all the phone number printings and so on. is theond problem constitutional courts and international law. it's about the european court, about what is more important, the judgments of european court or the russian legislation. and the constitutional court reverse anyt could of the european strasbourg rulings if it contradicts the constitutions.

it's a very wide interpretation, just suppose it was made because of that case. amount of the huge money that russia must pay. thing is the so-called spy cases. there is a trend now. personally, my good friend, a barrister, who deals with those cases. example, a man worked in some secret service 10 years ago, and then he filed some foreign company and he is a spy

and he could be sentenced to 20 years. this is a trend now in russia. his expulsion of foreigners -- for example, i was in some cases a translator to some foreigners who were forced to leave the country, and at least three americans from my native town were exposed. centerse in detention with illegal immigrants for several days, and the most obvious thing that we have plenty of visa types, but the main types are business or travel.

russia with the business visa to provide some lectures or something. no,the russian court says -- youdo some money write about your purpose of business. and now they couldn't into russia for another five or 10 years. ngos -- theng is so-called law of foreign agents. was announcedn last year and we liquidated the ournization because

official position -- that we should work like this -- we are not foreign agents, we are independent with independent human rights. after that we created to organizations -- one received foreign money. grants, consulate of europe grants. organization didn't make any public statements, demonstrations. the second organization didn't receive any money, but we did press releases, we worked with media, newspapers, so on. organizations are also declared as foreign agencies.

tried to play on your side, by your rules -- if you don't , we will be like independent lawyers with no open want to know about our funding, and so on. that's not a problem for us. the most important thing i would like to say in the final part of my speech is the problem of torture. i am a member of committee against torture, so it is my topic, my issue. torture is everywhere. in the united states also, of course.

in china, in europe. that how theem is stage reacted on these. that is the task of our organization. we are not trying to combat torture -- we tried to, but we know that police motility is absolute. it is obvious. persuade instigators to instigate effectively those cases, and that is our task. the most problematic region in russia, of course, if you are talking about torture, is the chechen republic.

the militiamen, in our small haveization, we managed to 110 convicted police officers in torture cases. but none in the chechen republic, because the federal instigators couldn't work there effectively, and i had many conversations with those federal russian instigators. they said, i couldn't question a police officer because he will beat me. there are plenty of criminal cases, but there are no convicted police officers.

conditions --out i have already said i can enter every prison in my region, but as you may know , we have a strong economic crisis in russia and they cut everything that is possible. i had many conversations with , wepresident -- they say demolished every single dock in prisons. there are no dogs now. because of the economic apprentice. it's terrible. things got worse. think those the main topics that i just wanted to speak about -- if you have any

questions, thank you. >> thank you, anton. we will start the question-and-answer session. i will ask the first question, to all our speakers. questionnswer the however you want. russia is a country with a long history. a thousand years of formalized state. time withprosperous it is economies, but always worth vertical power. there was no any other system in russia ever -- it always was the system where everything was decided by somebody on the top of the country, and very much policy was based on the kind of

person you have on the top. imperial russia, soviet russia, it was always the same system of power, vertical power. extremely hierarchical. tell me if i am wrong -- i'm not a historian. russia has a history -- propaganda, it's always propaganda, and it always had human rights violations. so all three statements are what we can see the historic heritage we have got. so why do we have hopes that this will be different? i mean, after the break up of the soviet union, we had dreams of it being a democratic country, but nothing has changed. arguments tony

believe that conflict can be changed so drastically? no imperial style of internal policy? it will have respect for media and for human rights? how long will it take and what should we do, particularly with the united states or other countries? every effort so far we have tried to put have failed. thank you. the microphone is here. i have at least three friends who are now in their 50's, and one is in his 80's and 50's, and another in his late 40's. they all used to be alcoholics.

for most of their lives. one of them is american. [laughter] >> out of think it really matters. 80's, hewho is in his quit drinking when he was 45, so sober,lived for 35 years absolutely clean. but the way he quit trunking -- everyone around him was saying, you have been treating all your life, you don't know any other examples, you don't know what sobriety is all about, you hardly remember when you were sober. there is no hope, no hope. he has been 35 years clean and happy, family, everything. of course, not every parallel works. but how i would answer -- of

course there is hope. otherwise, what's the use of tryingor gathering here, to figure out ways and scenarios for russia, describing the problems? historian, but i would not completely agree with you as far as the history of russia. [laughter] >> if you take the entire as wey of russia, as long remember and have the name, that's at least 1200 years and for the first five o 500 or 600 century,fore the 14th

russia did have democratic stations. --you take the key of russia they haveussia, democratic traditions even by today's standards. the history as compared to other countries, kiev was a democratic state. more democratic than a lot of countries of europe at that time. past six or seven centuries, russia has been an example of autocratic rule with violations of human rights everywhere. but then again, if you take europe, it's ahead of russia or but what ares, three or four centuries about if we look at the history of the world?

the roman empire was there for thousands of years and then it collapsed. --t i'm saying is we must week, meaning the citizens of russia who care, and the citizens of the world who care, americans who care, because he didn't care in 1917, but the consequences of 1917 in russia those of the consequences of 1917 and the of decades that followed. definitely we have to do everything we can to find a way solutionind a better for the russian crisis. >> but it seems to me that my

ideas not popular for russians. we always say that we are proud of living in the great country. i don't want to live in the great country, i want to live in a happy country, i want to live in the normal country. after 1945,istaken, the world coalition restricted the abilities of germany to have armies and some other things. calm andometime will russia will be for been to be the great country. bute it will be divided, the only thing our so-called patriots -- we live in the great country, we have sanctions, whatever, but we live in the great country. i don't understand it. my idea is to stop the greatness of the country. i thinkink that

better than they do. >> i have a very pessimistic position on this issue, so i shouldn't talk about it. [laughter] >> thank you. go ahead. introduce yourself, please. >> hi, i'm michael brody. i'm an environmental guy, formally of the epa, starting it some 16 years ago. i started doing a lot of projects and after retiring i did a little teaching. i have been all over russia, backpacking and camping, all sorts of stuff. but i would like to start by saying, thanks to my compatriots , the russian jews who moved to israel, they are a lot safer. thanks to putin, the chemical weapons are out of syria and the weapons grade uranium are out of iran. so we need to have perspective. if you look at u.s.

intervention, do you really want us to help you? do you see any evidence that it would be -- that it would change something that you guys care about? even look at bosnia and kosovo. they are slowly but surely becoming -- we cleared out the serbs and the saudis. what would you think we could do that would help the general welfare in russia? >> thank you. who wants to take this? well, in 1991, i spent three and a half months checking around this country. that was a great experience. --emember speaking on c-span i was asked the same question. how would you like the u.s. to help the soviet union? it was still the soviet union. my friend and i we said, help

people, not the government. the guy in the u.s. was giving credits to the russian and those credits i assume were stolen. we believe that the best way to , and i still think it is the best way, is developing private enterprises, helping and educating people. i understand what she is talking about when she is speaking about the patriot position. i want my country to be happy, i will let people to be happy. i think if they ask themselves seriously, they will answer that they want to be happy and not great. in terms of size of empire and so on.

but i am definitely against the situation, where in the u.s. would invade russia or make some restrictions against russia, like russia should never have becauseweapons, solely i don't believe it will work. there are some people in russia who hope for a popular revolt that would be supported by the --t or financed by the west the west should do anything to read russia of putin. what i think the west should do -- everything to change russia, to help russia change. the initiative should still be , if the russian people initiative cuffs on the outside, russians will never forget that. it will always remain in that historic memory and they will

remember -- we were changed from the outside. there is a difference. there is a difference. i understand the logic, but there is a difference between not to germany -- nazi germany after the war, japan after the war, and today's russia. we may regret that but there is a difference. yes -- i do believe that russia should receive a very hard lesson, a very hard lesson. >> how many times? >> no, from itself. probably the previous lessons were not enough. having what we have for it now. but i am definitely against any sort of intervention of the sort

you are talking about. -- sanctions, the sanctions you mean whether they are good or bad or useful or not? have balancedwe the sanctions. we would have gone through the economic crisis anyway, because the system of governance is wrong. you can't roll a country by personality. if you rule by personality, it's authoritarian and that will to whatever wrong moves and foreign policy russia has made. bringing foremost, russia to the huge mistakes and domestic policy and russian economy.

sanctions, not sanctions, russia would be there anyway. >> i cannot agree with this. i think when we speak about the lesson, what could be more than the lessons -- was my father, who was imprisoned in 1938, he went to work for putin. he shouted, what did i do? that lessonieve would be not enough. >> world war -- and yes, they will be punished hard, and after west -- can talk of the this fortunately hasn't happened

and we don't want it to happen, i'm sure what would you suggest? in terms of practical steps. he would suggest for americans to do what? americans think that should do something instead of us -- you are quite right in that part. but i don't think that when you talk about sanctions -- sanctions work not against the us.er, they work against didn't you have problems with that system? situations --ral it works against children who died, they started dying after this law was adopted. i think sanctions work not against leaders. -- he said the big

fault of the west is there politic. maybe he is right. about practical station, about how can you help since 2000, our organization received many usa, nations of democratic -- nobody cared about it. crimeaall started after -- i think if there is

maybe justization, when our political leaders make a deal about ukraine, crimea, and syria after like previousl be years, we could receive grants any orderst execute country -- wegn work independently. i think the crucial thing is to explain to all and russian officials how the system works we have -- we write a project by everythingreview that we want to country -- we

work independently. i think the crucial thing is to explain do. we don't execute any orders. i think that is the crucial thing. government isn not very tolerant to ngos of course. that it's an issue that we can discuss later. >> it's a good question. that question -- i ask all the time. why should america be concerned? why? the reason for you guys to be concerned about this country -- if you -- it is because of something in your national interest, that is why. interest, whyr should russia change?to satisfy your interest , your vision?

-- why a close circle are you trying to change us? i am a threat to you? i will fight you? what is your united states interest? unfortunately, american government doesn't give a clear answer why. what do you want? what is your objection? what is your goal? d1 russia as a democratic country? ok, but why don't russians want it? hypothetically. what is your business? why doesn't china teach russia how to live? india -- why not india?

why american president or department of state comes to give a lecture? i know it should be done that way, but still -- you have to answer the question of why. what is our interest in russia? what do we want to see? good, so that is -- let's give another question and go back down. >> hello. director oftive wisconsin international ukrainian. i really do appreciate this panel in the perspectives that are being put forth. nikolai, you started off with a

really great point about the askory, and i would like to -- in context with that, we -- a formk of culture of binding. whether we call it history or culture, which is built up over hundreds of years, thousands. so maybe the culture has been cultured -- maybe the or the dynamic in russia are unique on to russia, as any culture is unique. so where we are looking at that, how would this and russia, the how wouldrussia --

they address the issues that are important to russia, to be able to succeed successfully, for russia to be a part of the world status, whichrent is not necessarily in the interest of russia and its role in the community? natalia speaking with a different take on how to accomplish that. so what each of you approach -- how could it be done within russia? it's not about the u.s. or germany or so forth to tell -- how would the russian people come to make this so? thank you. >> you know what -- if we talk

about culture, if we talk about hourslogy, this can take of discussion. -- i wasst say this staying with my friend in los angeles just a month ago, and he had problems with an infestation of roof rats. that was a huge problem. corner,them to the traps did not prove helpful. solely because their bodies would rot in place in the order would attract new generations of rats. he finally figured out that away should be crafted for the rats to come out, come down from the roof. that he should make it

impossible for them to get back. he made this metal thing, this metal board around the wall of the house so the rats could come down but never come up again. my idea is that sooner or later, this will happen. the russian elite will just have to gather, said at the roundtable and invite representatives of the opposition. theywill not do this -- will not do this and self interest, they will do it because they want to survive. because they will not want to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. they will have to work out a set of rules which would change

russia into a country ruled by law rather than personality. this is where i think the u.s. should help, because this things like require guarantees from the west, from western leaders and american leaders, guarantees that the members of the russian elite will not be prosecuted and stuff like that. long process that will require negotiation, the best minds from russia and the west. that is technically how this transition could be made. but talking about culture -- yes , we do have this historic but it's like with any human being.

speaking about this example of an alcoholic, what needs to be done for him to stop drinking? one day they have to find mud on thedeep in edge of death, literally. that is when the person has to face this choice. death or a new life? --s is where i agree with russia probably needs to find herself in a situation like that , and the fact that it has not democracy the way of is probably because it hasn't yet found itself in an institution like that. we don't want this to happen in the form of a popular revolt in russia or anything, because any

revolt will lead to unpredictable circumstances, including leaving nuclear arms in the hands of the people like these -- or they can explode anywhere. i do believe that culture can be changed. we can change ourselves. every person can change him or herself without the training him people,lf, educating talking to people, changing their mind by means of television, internet, lecturing, everything. as a journalist, i can tell you for sure -- we can make a dream team of russian journalists and if we make it to television and spent several months -- the cultural change. people will change.

the way propaganda has worked for the past 15 years, we have it can changely the minds of certain people. it can work the opposite way, too. i absolutely believe there is a chance. i will personally do my best to take advantage of that chance. the country falling apart, a civil war, everything else that can happen -- this will not make the world a better place. >> i would like to say something to follow-up. changes like you want to -- just to dramatize it -- you want to change what you think is right for russia. they think this is what is right for russia. them asay you will see

the subject of manipulation. leader, lessatic itocratic, but basically depends on who has a tv channel. that's what you are talking about. >> that's why i say that the measures seem that needs to be done is to change the country by role -- that's not what i'm saying. from ruled by personality to rule by law. that's why i'm talking about the elites getting together and making a new set of rules. --don't you think >> i am absolutely sure this will not happen. 10 years ago we -- thisn the problem channel changed a lot.

question -- i the asked him, but he answered, it was not enough blood for russian democracy. >> absolutely. absolutely. i was quoting a famous russian politician -- he said that russia paid for democracy with blood, meaning the three young men who died on august 19, 1991. yes, that is true. >> i think we can add many lives and it seems to me that when mr. will give, it is something fantastical. i am also sure that in forming people of what is going on is not enough.

everyoneid already, can see the information on the internet, about the invasion and crimea, about anything, but people do not go on to the street. my hope is for mr. putin himself, because i think there are a lot of people who don't care about politics, but some -- sunday, when he goes to the pedestrian crossway, takes thesomebody business of somebody's husband or wife. there are many abilities to be power, and they attract drivers. i remember who wrote this

article -- they began to protest, but they were poor. i think that these are restrictive laws. -- all the people who suffer for it, they should take their labor. i know it sounds a little fantastical, but i think it will come soon. a brief commentary from my perspective. the applicants that come to us, we say we are foreign agents and the person says i don't care. we say we take money from abroad, they don't care. a person who faces police brutality and torture, some

atrocity or a mother's son who was abducted, they don't care about who helps him. in the united states and india and russia -- it is not a problem of culture, it is human dignity. everybody could face police brutality and human rights violations, detention and so on. i think the culture doesn't mean -- thank you. >> hi. mitchell -- ok. mitchell pohlman.

i have been involved in russia relations in one form or another for many years, in exchanges, doing elections. first a comment and a question. nikolai, why do we care about russia? it is really very simple -- they have lots of nuclear weapons point at us. that is all you have to say. whoever's controlling the button, what's going on in russia is going to be of concern to people, it is that simple. obviously we are going to take an interest. the complete opposite is true as well. i wanted to go back to our conversation earlier about what because in the 1990's, -- i remember that time very well. there were lots and lots of exchanges, lots of attempts to help russians on the people to

people level, some with private funding, somewhat small grants. , everything is foreign agents. it has gotten harder for americans to help russians on a people to people level, and that didn't start recently. lest we forget that the peace corps had a sizable program in russia in 2000 when it was closed on the grounds that it was a spying operation. as long as you have people in the government in russia who viewed with suspicion if not hostility everything coming out of the united states, we can only do so much. that quite ato add few russians don't even seem to realize that in the 1990's we provided a lot of help to russians. i knew journalists who commented learned for the

first time that americans had paid the salaries of nuclear scientist in russia in the early 1990's. he had never heard that before, and he is a journalist. apostrophe -- it was going to happen no matter what we did. i would like to hear russian journalists like yourself talk more about that rather than just accept the line that all the help we got of the 1990's was useless, and so on and so forth. the free market system, if that is what you want to call it, we have in russia today probably wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for technical experts from the u.s. >> the international

broadcasting bureau -- it defied logic, actually, that in the fight between the television staff in the refrigerator -- in the relative freedom of internet in russia, because they have the most number of internet users in the european countries, the tv set wins. how do you explain that? people who have access to internet and can get any kind of information still prefer to stay in the majority? >> i'm a former political economic assistant in the u.s. consulate. i was working in my office over 20 years and i was observing our

elections in russia. kremlinead that the wanted to make a truly legislative parliament election -- how? see is the only warrior in her field. it will not work. regions that don't know how to have fair elections? there.s no how to get i am not sure that i'm right, but my idea is that they want to very honest and very sensitive, that's my idea. and maybe it means they want to

change something but i'm not sure it's possible to do. , i'm not american but i wanted to answer your question, nikolai. crimea andis that the other countries are very nervous -- what will be next? all right. russiaas white people in don't freely use the internet -- well, they do. they mostly watch videos, funny videos on youtube, they use social networks to post their caps, whatever. it takes time is what i believe.

atevision or refrigerator -- one point they will come and if there is a good thing about the economic soon moree, it's that and more people will fill it. more and more people will understand that it's how their state works, it's the so-called that is of power and the reason why their refrigerators are becoming empty. they will understand that it is the television also, the television has played a great role in their refrigerators eventually becoming empty. when more and more people realize that, when more people realize they have to think for themselves, use their own brains

, that is when they will start reading more books, reading articles on the internet and not only posting caftans stuff. this process takes time. -- i, wanted to comment personally, no a lot of u.s. programs and exchange programs and educational programs and so -- ind yes, i keep telling keep sharing that information with the students when i lecture in moscow, when i talk to journalists. ken dious right now it is very -- and yes it is very difficult to launch programs, but then .gain

i -- i used to have a national television at my disposal when i was in my 20's. for then't have that past 10 or 12 years. but that doesn't mean i have to raise my hands and switch to traveling journalism. something, anddo to think of what we can do, and i am sure that is what i want to start with. both the russian people in the one hand, the so-called ordinary people, and the russian elites will really soon have to think about their place in the state elites whobut if the eventually have to get together and think of the magna carta or

something like that -- history knows, they have gathered in the past to change the rules by if it is thanks to those rules that they got their fortunes in power and so on. for the sake of their own survival, they will have to change in thisr major change will have to happen. >> i would like to make a brief comment about the question of why it is needed to interfere in our affairs. maybe it is very optimistic and -- i presumeut i that there should be a balance, after world war ii, the united i don'tsystem --

suppose it is the fifth column, ngos who are funded by foreign countries, because it should be a balance. from combatinga ngos? russian state let's commit against torture in the united states. i would certainly work against police mentality, and we have many cases in the united states havehe russian people lobbied news about police brutality in the united states and yes, they also torture. it should be a balance. ngos should be independent in every country. sponsors ngostes in russia and united states and

they shouldbecause be independent on human rights issues in every country. when an ngo sponsored by russian ,fficials -- it's not an ngo because that organization says just shake the hands of the state officials, and that is all. concerts, holidays, so on. i think there should be a balance, and maybe it is idealistic -- ok, thank you. >> i promised you guys i would cut it to 90. list, and i think you have to think smarter -- we have to get smarter and find a way

for the united states and russia to work together. let's thank our speakers, thank you, guys. [laughter] >> i hope i will see you soon. thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015]

thank you very much. announcer: the wisconsin primary it is this week, and a variety of polls show ted cruz with a slight lead over donald trump. senator cruz will campaign in the state today with an event at waukesha, and we will have that event live on c-span. campaign 2016 continues on tuesday, april five, with the wisconsin primary. live coverage begins tuesday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern. tune in for complete reaction and election results, taking you to the road to the white house on c-span, c-span radio, and c-span.org. zinsmeister is

the vice president of philanthropy at washington, d.c., and he spoke at the american enterprise institute aboutsamantha putting -- philanthropy, and he was previously with the george w. bush administration. these remarks are just over one hour. evening,n: good everybody. we are very grateful to the organization from milwaukee, wisconsin, and they have supported this for more than a quarter century. it is a special plasser to have

-- a special pleasure to have eister,'s office used to be around the corner from my own. a.i., whichchair at allowed him to do research on numerous topics which became articles and even books. launchpad, and karl's career is an example. he has many books and was embedded in iraq and produced two great books, including "dawn over baghdad." tovel comics invited him write a book based on his experiences. .e is also a filmmaker ann, heth his wife,

produced a documentary. he has extensive private sector experience, as well, having worked as an executive at a that manufactures arts and crafts furniture. i removed the townhouse he single-handedly renovated, and he has renovated a total of seven boutique properties and is now on a houseboat. he oversees a program, and the book on which tonight's lecture the almanac of american philanthropy, intended to be the definitive reference guide to the subject, and it has shaped his thinking about this lecture tonight. please join me in welcoming karl, who will be signing your

books after this lecture. [applause] thank you very: much. we are going to emphasize the av. embedded without the technology, so i am point to make it work here. i just want to apologize for my voice. suffering from that hoarseness.l four they played with peach baskets and birchbark balls. am sorry. thank karlyn and

a.i. for having me here. we go way back to we are almost and i thinkauruses, of it as when the fish were starting to climb out of the seas and walking around on land for the very first time. i was a young data researchers, and my job at that time was to inip mine interesting data the census, and some of you may not believe this but the plush fordwas the gerald office. he had a couch year, really built for an offense of lyman. you he i am here to tell had big hands.

is no one here who can fire me anymore, so i can tell you the truth. but the story that i'm going to tell you today -- i'm going to regret how to click these. this is the right one, and this is the left one. philanthropy is one of america's contributions. i have a goal that i want to persuade you that in our country, it is more than just a nice, civilized coat of paint on the national mansion. it is a deep part of our foundation and are very structured, and i'm going to resent some evidence that philanthropy is crucial in making america the unusual country that it is, so let's start with some numbers here. our nonprofit sector employs

workforce, and this, by the way, skips the voluntary labor, and if you put a figure on that, it would be even larger. to give you some perspective on this official gdp, this is a number for the named military industrial complex, which you know is often used as a shorthand for a formidable industry. well, guess what? the nonprofit sector surpassed that in 1993 and continued to grow beyond that. from discussions and academic , many are surprised that america's most generous cities are not new york or san francisco as they expect but mormonthe communities of

america and the bible belt. that is what you are looking at. new york is going to have a lot because it is a large city, but this is giving as a percentage of what you have to give. all kinds of essential facts are reported in this country, so people do not know the role it plays in our national health, and when i was at a roundtable, we decided to do something about this. it includes a philanthropy hall of fame, about 1000 of the -- in the book.

there are quotations any timeline that lies at about 350 years. this will fill some gaping holes in the national awareness. i promise you, it will not make you sleepy. the reason is basically the human interest items. odyssey's inad and this book. take this. bornis a man named ned, and raised in the louisiana bayou. garb is not difficult. forest, -- of a forest gump life. he came home and wrote a book on

wild turkeys and alligators, and as a ornithologist, he had about heuarter million birds that banded. he had a lot of interests. here he is all grown up. i am sure he is paying for life thosence and doing all of things that men capitulate to when they take off their furs and their bowties. he had a day job, which was manufacturing and selling the hot pepper condiment manufactured by his family, and let me tell you, there is real burning people's tongs. any use the money for an array of good works. there was the snowy egret. young, some of you may have run across this history. there was a craze for egret feathers in women's hats. i do not know about fashion, but

it is sort of the jimmy choo shoes. a media, women beating each other over the head to get one of these things, and the result of this is -- this is the wrong button. this is the right button. this is very fetching, i think you would have to agree. were a littlehers less understandable, and then ande were the mistakes, then be completely indefensible. all of these were very common in the 1920's, and guess what? huge run ond on a snowy egrets. they were never knocked off like coach handbags were because they were so distinctive. these were silly fashions, but they had a very not silly impact, which was to almost make the snowy egret extinct. and the philanthropist in him swung into action. his family owns an island and

still owns an island in louisiana, so he went out and literally eat the bushes or two full days and managed to find a and stuck themks in his coat and went home with the chicks, and he put these in a protected area and raise them up for a period of years, and at the same time he was doing that, he convinced some of his philanthropist friends, namely john rockefeller to buy up the , and in this fashion, he managed to rescue a really magnificent creature that was literally on the verge of disappearing from the earth. just about the same time he was doing this, he was getting into all kind of other things, and one of the really faceting aspects for me when i realized

he actedin his life, to kind of short-circuit a different extinction, a different kind of extinction. he had been raised with negro spirituals in his years, and he loved them. around his 60th birthday, as best i can tell, they were just dying out. people did not know the words to the music, and this was an oral tradition. these had not been written down. again, he kind of realize this was at risk of being forgotten, and it was not just his checkbook but also personal involvement. the first thing he did was track thesehese two ladies, elderly singers, who still remembered many of the old spirituals, and he hired a and thegist, and he musicologist sat down with these two ladies and asked them to sing their hearts out, and ask them to scribble as fast as they could, and they wrote down all of the lyrics and all of the harmonies and got been down in

the way they had been handed down from generation and it aation of slaves, and classic of the genre. there are 125 songs in the genre, and i was trying to see preservedere elsewhere, and about five or six, so some precious pieces of americana were saved for future generations single-handedly by this gentleman's effort. and, by the way, the songs that he's saying -- saved included martin luther by king, free at last, free at last. that was one of his songs. so think what kind of tragedy it would be to have this music, the artifacts of american culture really, be lost to history. that is the kind of wonderful idiosyncratic work that philanthropy can do.

here is another red-blooded american who helped to keep his fellow citizens free. alfred loomis. he was really passionate about science. from little boyhood. he just loved it. and he wanted to make it his life work but realized doing it on a scale would take an independent fortune, so he jumped into moneymaking on wall to compress a really fascinating story that i tell more fully in the book but do not have time for now, he financed most of the rural of america, and he anticipated the stark market crash just brilliantly, and by the 1930's, he was one of the wealthiest men in america. that point, he completely retired from finance and put all of his energy and most of his money in life, as he said he would. he bought the mansion across the in suburbanhis home

new york, and he set up just a tremendous science lab in this tension, better equipped than almost any university lab in the country, and he was not a dabbler. he did very distinguished work there himself. one of his specialties was time. he did acoustic work. he was one of the first people to discover and categorize brain waves. he invited lots of scientists over from europe to work with him. he was not dabbling. andas very serious science, then he went to berlin, and two thing struck him there. and he thought long and hard about some side to the cap location's which might have defense uses, and he quickly settled on using radio waves to

detect moving objects, and his lab very quickly became the radar,l leader with which definitely did not exist, andot only did he do the theoretical work, he started seeing the production of radar sets, practical, usable radar sets, and the radar sets loomis was responsible for were produced in the thousands and put into ships and airplanes and other items, and he had a tremendous effect on the course of the war, and even more than his money, it was his method, his philanthropic method, which accounted for his successes. weaponshe government r&d labs. i think it was averaging. i cannot remember, but he was just appalled by how sluggish and how bureaucratic these labs were. they were saying, we know weapons are important come but that is the next war' is worry,

and he was saying, no, it is not. you have to get on this right now. they realize how brilliant he was at producing radar, they said they needed that guy on the atomic bomb. so this lifted up and dropped into the manhattan project. and most of these were transferred to the manhattan project, so he was functionally the father of the atomic bomb as well as radar. he personally made these cyber , and loomis made this happen. he used the industrial connections and money to find the stockpiles of copper and iron to build this gigantic, industrial machine in the middle of a wartime shortage, so just a brilliant record. and the cherry on top for me when i was doing this research, it was not only his philanthropicl

way that he devised that lived on today. he also left behind a flesh and blood embody and -- embodiment of his style. his great grandson is this guy, if anybody recognizes this. that is reed hastings, which like his grandfather is a big game changer. he was the founder of netflix, and by my calculation is now disrupted three major industries in the u.s., and on the philanthropic side, he is one of the great progenitors of charter andols in this country, another entrepreneurial man who put deep imprints on america was this man. that is george eastman, who as founder of kodak popularized photography in the early 1800s. when he began, the process was all guesswork. there was very little process science involved. in the startup of his company,

there was a period of time, a few weeks where there was a series of failures of the gelatin, the industrial gelatin, that was used to the photos, and people were sending and photos, and they were coming up black, and it would have killed the company fast,y could not fix it and the cows whose carcasses were boiled down to make industrial gelatin -- i do not know if you know that is where gelatin came from, but it is, but there was a lack of sulfur in the grass they were eating, and that tiny missing element was enough to cause this in photography, certificate this out, he said that is never going to happen to me again. i'm going to master the basic science so i know what is going on. from anded a chemist

of stuart little school called boston tech, and there were these mines that came to him, and in gratitude, he later funded the transformation of boston tech into today's m.i.t.. theuilt this building and rest of the m.i.t. campus, where now stands come were now resides, and he is to a large degree responsible for making this the great school that it is today. passion plays a big role in philanthropy. eastman, he had a pie fork and installed in his home in rochester, and he hired a guy to come in every morning and wake him up. it was literally his alarm clock. that sounds like the life. love music and so many ways. there was a wonderful journal entry where one of his friends

accompanied him, and they took and 12 operas in six days. george is absolutely alcoholic about music. that is a good way of putting it. he this passion for music enjoyed, one of the great cultural gifts of american history. he just willed into existence, and built to world prominence, the eastman school of music in rochester. was really school important in american i think classical music and in popularizing classical music. a conductor, to be you had to go to europe. or a great player. there just was not a tradition here, and eastman almost single-handedly helped to develop that. this was very important in film from really kind of a cheap, vulgar undertaking at that point to an art form or potentially an art form. that happened here. he hired classical music

orchestras to play in between the reels of the movie to get that transformation started. donorr very idiosyncratic who gave money to world changing research was catherine mccormack. by the way, i only noticed after i put this live into my slideshow that i think she is wearing egret feathers. that is the way it goes sometimes. people know that this has been important in breakthroughs. a lot of people know that polio was a philanthropic rocket. andthis was the creation a reaper mccormack was of the international harvester fortune. that was her fortune, and she was an early women's rights activist. i have to say she was more than a little bit crazy, but she was very determined to make a difference in the world, and very talented, and she made a

preventingnd pregnancy as easy as taking a daily aspirin. that was the assignment, and she put the equivalent of about $20 million i my math of her own math,into this -- by my and she was the sole and entire funder of this whole thing. she has some significant sign straining herself, and by 1957, she and her scientific partners had nmda approved pill. she absolutely reveled in this accomplishment. at one point, she even walked into a local pharmacy and got a , and theren filled is this donor pride you get when you do something like this, i guess. the foundation, which you are looking at here -- people do not realize this was based in southern california for a while.

white once described as mcdonald as a large body of money, and surrounded by people who want some. of you look at a big pile silverlight before the foundation or like a lot of these wealthy donors i have just and actually,g, philanthropy in the u.s. is not just a story of moguls. in fact, it is not primarily a story of moguls. the story of big foundations. the latest numbers, only 14% of charitable giving comes from foundations, and 5% more comes the restdations, and comes from individuals, and the bulk of that, by the way, comes from small to moderate individuals, and annual rate of about 25 hundred dollars per household, so it is a phenomenon, and that is the real money.

foundation, it is huge. it is the biggest foundation ever and an important institution, but you realize the gates giveaway about $4 billion a year. away per year here is about $360 billion, so they are a drop in the bucket so to make sure that this really crucial reality does not get overlooked, with the bank of i want toilanthropy, introduce you to a few of the folks i have uncovered. these lovely people -- i am sorry about the terrible photo. it is the only one that existed. york,re from upstate new gus and marie. gus was a plumber, and marie was a nurse, and they did weekly square dancing. i think that is the outfit they are wearing. there's square dancing deer, and

they were square dancers and fastidious savers, and when they died, they left more than $3 million. then there was a shy auditor who with $5,000 in the bank total. she was also a frugal liver, and with some frugal living and some clever stockpicking, she turned that into over $20 million when she died at the age of 101, so she gave it so that poor girls to go to medical school and college. and kind of everybody's mom, a woman who kept a vegetable garden and mode the lawn herself until she was in her 90's to save money. her financial advisor said her goal for years and years was to amass as much as she could so he could go to the salvation, and when eleanor died in 2011, she over $1 million to the

modesto branch of the salvation army. shined shoes in pittsburgh. he was a shoeshine guy, and he did for more than 50 years, and back in 1981, he decided he was going to get every penny of his tips to the pittsburgh children's hospital. i do not know what the reason was, but it was a pledge he kept. it is for families who need care for their child but cannot and he ended up donating more than $200,000 to children's hospital, which was about a third of his total earnings. critics say inar response to these stories, well, l, but lovely tale, kar this kind of small, dispersed anything large, can never achieve anything important, but the very clear verdict of american history is that those are wrong. very, very wrong.

many remarkable things have been done through our history by dispersed giving, which often abrogates in very for medical -- very formidable ways. the state of ohio, with just 3 million inhabitants in 1880 had 37 colleges. all right? million people, 37 colleges in ohio. that very same year in england, the nation with 23 million colleges do you think they had? a grand total of four. what explains that? is it the small-scale education philanthropy. a picture. you these are the colleges in ohio. that was the frontier. that was the wild west. the year that the case western reserve university was founded. western reserve eventually became quite a powerhouse in science. i think something like 60 nobel

prize winners have been associated with it, and a lot of prominent businesses you would have heard of came out of case western, but what is great is that at this point, it was basically a little. that was built up solely through sacrificial giving by its neighbors, by lots of local little people on the ohio frontier. i read the story of one theorter that during winter, when the wagons and forces were not busy, they hauled stone. that was his contribution. another family pledged a fraction of their egg sales. that added up for this college and plenty of others. eastern churches in the 1840's decided they wanted to pull together little donations and send them west to places like this.

within 30 years, those churches than $1together more million which nurtured 18 colleges. here is a slide that of ohio after that campaign had been going. has been played out in many parts of our country. i chose ohio because i had good data for this fall does now flashforward 22015. today, there are 50 separate colleges in the middle of campaigns that will raise more than --. realize, stateou universities like the university of virginia or university of california at berkeley are dependent upon voluntarily given revenues. here are the figures. gift incomet more

then state funding and so does berkeley. even though these are prominent state universities. lots of innovative philanthropic's underlie this. i did not realize until i got into this that the and dowd chair, a huge reason our university are successful. -- and dowd chair. endowed chair. i just spoke at the university of kentucky. recently received a large donation. this is the man responsible. he is a homebuilder. adulted almost his entire

life in arizona. so why kentucky? what is going on here? i ask people and figured out, it turns out all 16 of his great-grandparents worked kentuckians and so he felt a connection.tact -- that is an example i want to give next. in our country and has always been personal. not just big giving but all giving. to illustrate his, this is a broadway lyricist named michael brown. broadway lyricist is a good way to go broke. but he got lucky in 1956 and had an unexpected miracle under his belt. for their christmas celebration, they invited a friend, a young far from heror --

home in south carolina. they wanted to show their fortune. toward the end of their gift exchange, they handed the woman and envelope. inside was a note that read, you have when you're off from your job to write whatever you please. merry christmas. harperter's name was lee. harper lee, when she cited she wanted to become a writer she did what most people do. she left mississippi and went to new york city. she ended up paying -- spending more time trying to evade rent than writing like most people do. she was working in a bookstore and an airline office. the brown family noticed this and in a very personal active philanthropy, they decided to do something about it. with the donation in hand, harper lee quit both of her jobs and during that gift in your wrote "to kill a a mockingbird."

it became one of the most influential books of all time. and beauty ofwer american philanthropy for me to range ofom the vast causes that have been underwritten by our millions of causes. i do not know how many of you realize these are the homes of some of our greatest founding fathers. top cultural treasures. do you realize everyone of them is preserved not by the public work service or some other organization but by privately funded non-profits. vernonwashington's mount was saved by thousands of donors from what was called the mount vernon ladies association. they continue to run it to and they are doing it a spanking job. it is completely thriving. monticello, which is sometimes described as thomas jefferson's greatest creation as been

protected by more than a century by a private foundation that receives no public funding. none. peltier, aon's mount fascinating story, the summer cottage where abraham lincoln spent a quarter of his presidency. you see it in the bottom right corner there, he made some of his most moment his decisions in this house, including drafting most of the emancipation proclamation on his back porch. those days,use in some of you may know, was mayhem. you can walk in the front door and people dead all the time. he was such a responsive human being, he could not say no to anyone. when he really wanted to relax, he and his family went up to the cottage northeast.

this was mulling away until a bunch of donors came up. -- the same thing can be said by most historical places. salem, mystic seaport, all of those are products of private philanthropy. our great cathedrals and churches are in many cases products of private philanthropy. st. john the divine in manhattan is a classic example. started with a big gift from a big guy. jp morgan. got it launch. the heavy lifting was done over a time of generations by lots of small donations that trickled in. work was done as the donations pulled up. our cathedral of human learning, libraries, or another fruit of private philanthropy. this is the new york public

library reading room. not only it but all of america's public libraries and initially were created by donors. today, u.s. public libraries have about a billion and a half public visitors each year. many of our magnificent parks are also fruits of philanthropy. the list of national donors is very long. it starts with the katie a, goes to the virgin islands. this is the grand teton's. the great smoky's. all of these were basically launched by private donors. speak, the interesting thing going on in parks today is urban parks. some of you may remember when central park was falling apart and becoming a dangerous place and not very well used. private donors came along and did not just give money. they gave money but they also gave a new management structure

to the park. they insisted a 501(c)(3) would take over management of the park from the city. the conservancy had tremendous effect. about 4.5-five times since then. it is a beautiful place today and a huge part of city life. is extremely influential all over the country. beautiful, wonderful parks and oases all over. some of you have probably been to the high line. the discovery green in houston is another example. there is a $350 million park being built right now intel some. there is a trail in chicago. so many of these things, all driven by private philanthropy. five and have been at some miraculous recovery of numerous and danger to species, too.

this is the paragon falcon. one of my favorite creatures. this is the fastest living being one of flies. but when it is reproducing, it is a snail. they were not reproducing at anything of a necessary rate and where flirting with extinction. the government tried to speed up failed.ding rates but along came a wonderful odd marriage of a grant from the ibm corporation. and atton-down blue tie whole bunch of people from the aquamarine hobbyists. the people that catch the birds and fly them. this weird, on couple, got together. thinking of how to overcome the problem. they said they love height and

pigeons. back?would they come a city skyscrapers, someone said. now there are arrogance -- now peregrines all over. crucial come back to all kinds of other animals. classic, the bloomberg grassroots philanthropy. -- it wasurkey basically hunters who brought back the while turkey. another donor did all kinds of things. outs the guy who figured once birds had been reestablished in the united states, they had to be taught to migrate. the first time, they do not know how to do it will stop then they can do it after that. guy said, let's use an ultralight airplane to fly them to florida. people thought he was mad. most people are not going to

volunteer their agency to try. but it was very successful. philanthropy is terribly science in general. all kinds of science. you are looking at a telescope. i do not know if you realize, starting at way back in the observatories and mount wilson, mount palomar, all of those really great high-end instruments were filled with light by private money. massivereally instruments under construction right now are the giant magellan and the 30 meter telescope. both of those are products of donations, big donations. this is the 30 meter. created by a $250 million gift by the founder of the intel corporation, gordon moore. he slapped that down for the process to kick it off.

other philanthropists have been hard-spurred by donors. medical research is a good example. in 2013, philanthropy magazine did a special investigation of some of the pioneering lending that john rockefeller did for research. prize-winning nobel scientists had been boosted up money.ckefeller the breakthroughs that were made by these folks were for all kinds of important things. penicillin, yellow fever vaccine, fundamental genetic things we know now all grew out of that seminal funding from john rockefeller which began a grandson tot scarlet fever. he jumped in and helped a lot of other people out of that

tragedy. for an assistance is also important. very few people know private philanthropic funding sent to oversee the now substantially feeds the -- exceeds the official money from our government. you can see we had 39 billion and private donor nations for overseas poor folks and 31 billion of government aid. it is not just the quantities that matter, by the way. fields, it tends to work in very different ways from public funding. philanthropy is more experimental. quicker. more efficient. personalized.hand thing. take the last personalization. many of the most interesting and successful mechanisms in the charitable world, things like micro lending circles or

mentoring programs or the foundation that keeps kids from dropping out of college or a complex anonymous. all rely very heavily on individualized solutions. on the one-to-one accountability. advantage ofng useful information that becomes at your fingertips if you actually know someone and state of dealing with a stranger. personal rather than an personal transactions, they use the power of relationships to change behavior and that is powerful. mother theresa used to say, i never think about crowds of i think about individuals. that kind of the letter post of a, the administrator government program has to think about crowds. they cannot think about the individual. governments are all about the individual, about treating

someone the same. you cannot have if it approaches for different people even though that would work better. this consistency of government program's gets romanticized. it is easy to romanticize because it is it, clearly defined, out there. people look at philanthropy of thing, a crazy quilt in comparison. consistency is not how human teams work. if you have one child and your family, for instance, in a very structured environment and a wins when given the freedom to explore boundaries. you do not need one-size-fits-all. you need individualized services that recognize and work with the intimate differences between different kinds of personalities. you will have a hard time finding that in any government program, almost by definition. what it is a hallmark of philanthropic efforts. which leads us to this great $50 word that every american ought

to know. polly are key. oligarchy. -polyarchy. kind of the opposite of monarchy. the united states is a notable sector.y giving like many legislatures, they are fixingg what it needs and our society. it is a very diverse type in action. thinker i admire points out that everyone measures community needs with different calipers. millions of individual charitable decisions lead to much more variety into diverse spending and better protection of non-mainstream points of view

than a single government program can or ever could. carter refers to philanthropy as democracy in action." i think it is apt. most philanthropy that takes close on a local level is out of the public eye. often a anonymous. it is easy to overlook the kind of actions i have been describing to hear. most of us never see more than just a few fragments of the private giving iceberg. even people in the business lose scope.f the size and we grossly underestimate the problem solving power of charitable action and how valuable it is. who gore lots of critics out of their way to discount the idea that two major concerns can be addressed by private responses. messages, philanthropy

privately is skewed. i'm not against it. if you want to solve the problem, get big, get governmental, or go home. that is the clear message. when of the criticisms you will hear about philanthropy is philanthropy is just a drop in the bucket. i want to remind you, when i started this talk and i showed figures, keep that in mind. here are a few additional tidbits. the gates foundation alone, which i told you is a tiny sliver only of our overall, entire philanthropic apparatus. the gates foundation alone distributes more overseas assistance then the entire italian government. it is estimated that and just its first two decades, the overseas vaccine program that gates runs, their vaccine program alone, is estimated to have saved almost 8 million young children. that is not a drop in the bucket. in anyone's bucket.

i want to take you further. bill gates has sent some pretty remarkable thanks. guess what? his fraction of the total amount of money that america's sense to needy people overseas is again, very modest. religious congregations alone, churches and synagogues muddling their money together and sending it overseas is about 4.5 times what gates does every year. and then there are the nonreligious giver. there is a big iceberg underneath that tip and it is easy to underestimate it. -- syracuse better win. i just sacrificed my vocal cords for them. [laughter] >> another thing you hear is that the law to pa is not coordinated. -- philanthropy is not coordinated.

it is all over the goal. government spending is the opposite. orderly. uniform. everyone is marching in the same direction. there is a certain kind of mind that appeals to. but there are serious problems with standardization. in human affairs, it can have very harmful effects. i worked for three years in the west wing overseeing domestic holocene and anytime we would take up a problem i would think, you know what? the matter we do, no matter how careful we are, no matter how deeply we think this through, we are going to discombobulated millions of people. it is inevitable. entireemma is the federal apparatus wings in one direction every time there is a rule change. that is what role changes do. you pull the rug out from a lot of people when you do that. competing to test policies. many times i wanted to, but it is not feasible at the federal level.

i wanted to turn a positron slowly and see what happens. you cannot do that. it is all or nothing. -- turn a profit on slowly. because humans are not predictable robots, the healthiest forms of society i would argue are often going to evolve through lots of little trials and errors. many of the efforts will fail. is, salon's will not also bringing in one direction at the same time, that is fine. will cancel themselves onto a large degree and these successes will be visible and people will copy them. argument for dispersal of resources. divided attacks. independent assessment. all of the things private philanthropy provides. the fact it came from a date certain. there was a wonderful new word coined to describe what i am

referring here to describe a reliance on disbursed authority to fix things. that word is crowdsourcing. course, you know, crowdsourcing is all about how you do find it. i would say, lots of people taking lots of small bites out of big problems that allows them to eventually chew through those big issues. if you are one of those individual people and you think, i am wasting my time i cannot kneel this on my own. you have to recognize you are part of an army. that is what gives crowdsourcing its power. the effectiveness of this mechanism is brought into effect by the computer revolution. when it first began to unfold it was about the big ibm mainframe computer but it very quickly became clear that was not the future. it was not particularly effective at solving problems.

this was the future. the story of the internet. the entire story of the internet is the accumulated power of millions of small actions. the hacker culture you see depicted here, one man with a laptop can do amazing things. there are aspects of this culture you may or may not find appetizing, but this is one of the clearest lessons of the last decade or two. my argument would be that the small-scale, decentralized, inuniform, not orchestrated this model should not be a problem for philanthropy or any other aspect of society for that matter. the next time that you hear philanthropy criticized, i want about this.

and about chartered schooling. largest,ooling, the tipest, best funded is the schools. they have 183 different schools. sounds like a lot, right? there are 78,000 charter schools in this country. heavyweight, the big roulette, has just a tiny fraction of the overall markets. schools, they are part of a chain of three or four schools. this is a radically decentralized sector. allows some interesting things to happen. it allows a riot of choices. i do not know of a lot of you have spent much time in charter schools, but it is a fascinating underworld these days. there are science schools, schools built around great books.

academies, hippie schools without doors or windows are controlling features of any sort. there is a much more variety than you will ever find and traditional, district-run schools. the philanthropic lee district charter movement is built on the idea there is no single definition of what constitutes a good school. an exercise in matching. it is all about matching. you want to match each child's gifts and temperaments with a school that will bring out his or her best self. are is a worse on -- here is war such test block for you. rohrsach blot for you. does it look like they don't have all the same roles, or does the ecosystem of options strike you as a healthy adaptation to

what people want. which brings us to a final item on the list of alleged weaknesses of philanthropy. the fact that some donors are mean. you will hear this for sure. they are selfish. they want their name on a building. yes what? it is absolutely true that some people do good works or not such good reasons. there's absolutely no reason to dean i that in my opinion. so let us closest talk with the knowledge meant that donors are not all saints. you are looking here at jay. paul getty. he was a cheapskate who when he was really one of the richest men in the world installed a pay phone at his estate to make his their ownfor telephone calls. some may remember this, at one point his grandson got kidnapped. remember this? held ransom for $17 million. them, negotiating with and leslie, forever. can you get that down a little bit?

to the point where they finally cut out the grandson's ear and mailed it to grandfather. then he resigned and said, ok. he paid as much as the ransom and tax deductible. do not ask me why ransom is tax deductible. it is. he paid $200 million and give the rest to a son as a loan so he can get his grandson out as a hostage. by the way.st, that is the kind of man we're talking about. not sweet and fuzzy. paul getty is j. also gave the world an collectionincredible of greco-roman art. then i will close before my voice drives you crazy. you're looking here at stanford. listen. there is absolutely no denying corruption made leland stanford rich. he built his railroad fortune on

every trick in the book. collusion. he did all kinds of backs, bribes, he got good at it. you name it. when his son died, genuine grief over this tragedy led him to decide he was going to use to benefitten money the children of california and ultimately all of us, by building stanford university. the messages, philanthropists are not always pretty. there is no question about the fact. it you do not need to be an angel to participate. the brilliant thing about this mechanism is that it will take is just as we are. selfish impulses. noble impulses. vanities of all sorts. they swirled together in every one of our breast. they will take done

that is the genius of the mechanism. so obviously, if i have done nothing else, i hope i have convinced you that philanthropy is just a huge and fascinating and powerful aspect of our culture. i have only scratched the surface of the "almanac." please grab one, and i hope you will try to keep track of one very profound reality. there's lot of human interest and fun stuff in there, but there's a deeper message, which is that voluntary giving in this country is not some sort of a cute hobby, not just a nice national sideline. it is right at the very heart of our country's success. with that, i will thank you very much. [applause] ms. bowman: thank you for a marvelous lecture. i'm sure it has generated some questions.

we will put these two questions on the table, and i will be right back. we will know two questions on the table first. >> how is the internet affecting philanthropy? you talked about crowd sourcing. mr. zinsmeister: the modern culture of the computer revolution is affecting philanthropy tremendously. philanthropy used to be an undertaking of retired people. as you know, a lot of people who have made internet fortunes are doing it very early. they are doing it in parallel with career building. that is a new model. it is not just the money you give, it is the insights you offer and the management skill and the wisdom and entrepreneurial talent that you bring to the table. it is a big influence. there are all kinds of technical aspects of the same.

some people would panic if the zuckerbergs announced they would give away their money without a traditional foundation. people say, that is not really giving it away. it can be giving it away even better. thank you so much -- some sort of commercial mechanism or hybrid mechanism. there is an explosion right now of mechanical innovation and technical innovation in the field, which is exciting and encouraging. >> i really enjoyed your darwinian mutation analysis of philanthropy. do you ever get into judgment of philanthropy? you emphasized about higher education. in my mind, higher education has become the end to itself as the cost of higher education has become -- the utility is less

than it once was. do you discuss, do you judge at all your work? mr. zinsmeister: you cannot help. i tried to keep my opinions out of the "almanac." the measuring stick is, did it make a difference? if it did, we put it in. it is important for us as observers of philanthropy to resist that temptation to judge, because very often you do not know what is going to result from an innovation. there are lots of examples in my book where people launched something and were not quite sure -- remember the ice bucket challenge a couple years ago? people said, oh, isn't that a trivialization of philanthropy?

they raised i think $160 million. the als association -- in january, i was struck by this -- one of the leading researchers at johns hopkins went on reddit and gave a talk where he said, if you think that the ice bucket challenge was trivial, and later they released an article that said they use this huge influx of als ice bucket challenge money to try an unorthodox approach, and they said it was likely that there would be important as therapies resulting from this in a few years. the clinical trials for those therapies have also been pre-paid for by the ice bucket

challenge. it is easy to scoff and anticipate problems, but i think the track record of philanthropy is such that it is market wisdom. let it run its course, and there are ideas that do not get renewed. you hope that the competition of ideas will handle that, because philanthropy is our innovation budget. it is way more risk-taking that anything the government does or that private companies will do, in the areas of medicine. it is our innovation budget. you are going to blow a lot of your budget. that is the nature of risk and experimenting. ms. bowman: question back here. >> i am with the american public transportation association. i missed the very beginning. detroit is a city where a lot of people believe in the city are saying i'm stepping forward in a philanthropy way. comments on any of that? mr. zinsmeister: the grand new bargain would not have happened without donors. it was the inside, and they said the squaring of the circle -- i

am trying not to -- that is the difference between politics and philanthropy. in politics it is all about the math of subtraction. philanthropy is all about addition. it is a different method, style, approach to public policy. when you get to a sticky wicket like detroit, which was a huge mess, the political instinct is to throw -- and that is probably what politicians should do. there has to be an accountability. but it does not resolve the problem. philanthropists have a different motivation. they want to get out of the woods. they do not want the treasures in the detroit art museum raffled off, they do not what the schools to shut down. they working in giving it a

second chance. they did not guarantee they would have a rosy future, but they gave them a second chance. ms. bowman: question right here. >> linda greenberg. i really enjoyed listening to the wonderful stories. every now and then, though, i thought sometimes these people do not work out quite as well as you would like. a person i remember was jeffrey sachs and his millennial village. he put a great deal of money and disappointed many people and caused so much harm. i know that we saw a lot of very good people. how about the people who took the money? they certainly had a goal and idea, but they were misguided. i think the scale of today is very large. mr. zinsmeister: a great point, and it is large because the scale of the good work is large,

too. this is a very big sector. i would say that the success-and-failure quotient is higher -- i would say it is way higher than government success-to-failure ratio. it is as high as much of the private sector. philanthropy is very meritocratic. you can really ruffle up a society for a short time, but it goes away. there is a deafness on bad programs. meanwhile, what was the last bad government program that got shut down? >> thank you for that fascinating lecture. i will follow up on the question to ask you about public-private partnerships. and for example, the u.n. foundation, which translated

into ted turner paying people inside the u.n. to find people who would further his agenda. in other words, he leveraged the u.n. by his philanthropic gifts. you will see philanthropists try to leverage contributions from the federal purse. what is happening with that, and what do we do? mr. zinsmeister: i am not a fan of public-private partnerships. they usually fold. the advantage is to have two distinct elements, that have different payoffs. this is all about a competitive approach to problem-solving. each sector has its strengths, and there are fields in which both will by definition be preeminent, but is very unwise to hybridize.

you will get an unpleasant mush in most places. it will not have any of the energy or distinctiveness that makes philanthropy really useful to all of us. ms. bowman: there are two right here. we will put both of these on the table. >> i used to work for the charles koch foundation. a lot of industrialists left their money to foundations that would be used in anti-capitalist causes. what do you think about foundations be set up to spend themselves out of existence? mr. zinsmeister: spending down is a big priority of modern donors. the fraction of foundations that used to spend down used to be

5%, and last time i checked is close to 30% now, and a fast-rising curve. not only because you can get into new attitudinal territory that would be unpalatable to the original donor, but because the power in most cases of this philanthropy is it is connected to the vigorous problem-solving ideas of the donor. and what could become embedded in a foundation -- it becomes sclerotic. you lose that freshness that made philanthropy important in the first place to encourage donors to spend hard when they are alive and make sure that the people they really trust clean up in 5, 10, 15 years after they had gone. george eastman was a pioneer in that, spending while living. ms. bowman: one more question,

this gentleman in the back, and then i would like to invite you to reception. >> it has been pointed out that 56% of americans will find themselves in the top 10% of earners at some point in their lives. can you talk about that american dynamism and what it means for american philanthropy. mr. zinsmeister: i found out a wonderful organizations i have never heard of -- a french organization, named for enoch. enoch was the man who could not die, and enochians is an association of firms that are hundreds of years old. the beretta gun company is still owned by the beretta family. a company was founded in the middle ages. the howard family in britain has

been one of the richest families in britain for 400 years, of the same family. you do not get this in this country. you have people who make money, lose money, and they give away money. part of the thing that is helpful to -- is the recycling project that is at the heart of philanthropy. think about this. bill gates last i checked has a personal fortune of $40 billion? he has pledged to give it all away except for $10 million to each of his children. he is hanging on to a fraction of 1%. he is using that money to build up another successful generations of americans, to help them succeed as he succeeded. he is by no means an exception. this is a part of american capitalism.

ms. bowman: thank you for coming. thank you to the c-span audience. and thank you to karl. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

on the next washington journal, a look at the congressional agenda, with paul kane of "the washington post" and christina peterson of "the wall street journal." also, joe gonzales talks about a new report that shows which states are the most and least

dependent on federal assistance. with "the gilbert milwaukee journal sentinel" gives us a preview of tuesday's wisconsin primary. we will also get your thoughts by phone, facebook, and twitter. >> tonight on "the communicators," executives of ,he american cable association and president and ceo matthew paul,, talk about the future of the cable industry and choices such as whether consumers will choose bundle packages over the current bundles with larger price tags and more channels, and the fcc's plan to open the market for companies to build and sell set-top boxes, and the regulation of the internet. >> fox and all of their networks will require that they be

distributed on the widest level of service. what we end up with is this bundle of bundles that everybody has to take. as an operator, i would love to disaggregate that bundle and sell it to people as they wish. most consumers don't recognize that if that happens, the price of the individual channels or the bundle of channels is going to skyrocket. >> consumers said they don't even want a box. the fact is that our members are providing choice through competitive set-top boxes, through giving consumers choices about which box to purchase, and coming back to the customer, being part of that relationship with the customer to determine what it is that they want most. >> watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span 2. c-span, the on

supreme court cases that shaped our history come to life with the series "landmark cases," our 12-part series that explores real-life stories and constitutional dramas the hind some of the most significant decisions in american history. >> this is a story about presidential power and its limits during times of war. it puts forth central themes about presidents doing things that may not be expressly stated in the constitution, and the limits that congress and the court can place on it. said, the cases come to be accepted by the culture. was a sweeping decision. it isolated the u.s. as one of four nations that allow abortion for any reason after fetal viability, and yet it has not settled the issue at all. >> we will look at the case that

significantly curbed presidential executive powers, stating that it was unconstitutional for president truman to seize control of steel mills during the korean war. watch "landmark cases" tonight at 10:00 eastern on c-span and c-span.org. next, a conversation with wall street investor stanley druckenmiller about the economy and millennials. he explains how the benefits that senior citizens enjoy might affect young adults in the future. this was at the university of california berkeley. it is just over an hour. mr. brady: welcome, everybody. it is great to be here.

i'm henry brady. i want to introduce our two analysts, but we're going to start with a short talk by stanley druckenmiller, outlining the issues with respect to youth in america today, and turn to a discussion with geoffrey canada and have it open to your questions. there.hould be cards out i think there will be people circulating with cards and collecting cards. those will be brought to me and i will choose questions to ask our guests. foundeddruckenmiller duquesne capital in 1981 and closed it, i think around 2010, but during that time, did very well and had a story career on wall street for his successes with his organization.

he also worked with george soros. druckenmiller knows a lot about finance. we will talk about issues of the future. part of what investing is about is thinking about the future. deeply andned profoundly about the future of young people in america. , theill see when he talks degree to which he's concerned about investments we are not making in young people and how they are crowded out by other investments we do make. geoffrey canada is an educator, social activist, and founder of the harlem children's zone, which he started in 1990. the harlem children's zone was designed to try to help children , young people in harlem, to get to college, graduate, and get good jobs. it is an innovative, comprehensive, and intriguing approach. it seems to be successful, and i

don't mean to be deprecating, but it takes a wild to evaluate some of these programs. we do know that many people think this is a model for things we should be doing elsewhere, and our president thinks that, having bought in the budget some proposals and programs that are trying to replicate what has been done in the harlem children's zone. the connection is twofold. they both graduated from bowdoin college. the other connection is, mr. druckenmiller over the years has helped raise money for the harlem children's zone, and geoffrey canada has provided the leadership to make it the success that it has become. with that, i want to turn to stand druckenmiller. welcome. [applause]

[indiscernible] so i have toller: turn mine off? mentioned that geoff and i were at bowdoin college together. as children of the 1960's, we used to think about protests and changing the world, but even back then, i had never been here, but berkeley, california was always the larger-than-life institution where movements started. [applause] it watchenmiller: interesting. how melanie about don't think the way -- millennials don't think the way

children of the 1960's thought and they are not into movements and protests. i look at a couple examples and i couldn't disagree more. when i think about how much this generation moved the needle on gay rights and what you have accomplished, i think it's ridiculous to suggest that this generation has not been involved in political activism with results. i would say the same thing about this generation in terms of the environment and climate change. i look at the movement that has been made in washington in the last 10 years and i think it is directly a result of this generation's activities and focus. puzzled by somewhat the fact, however, that there's another thing that your generation has not focused on. the reason i'm puzzled is, i think it's vitally important to your future, but also to the

future of the country, and it affects you directly. dean brady said i'm going to give a presentation. actually, i think we're going to have a conversation about this topic. i thought i would throw six or seven slides up here to get everybody warmed up with regards to this topic. if you look at the chart -- can everybody see this chart? , it is federal payments to individuals, or transfer payments. thatin the early 1960's, used to be 28% of all federal government outlays. it is currently 67%. over the years, we've gone from an economy that used to have transfer payments of 28% of the federal budget, to 67%. that in perspective, in the early 1960's, medicare and gdpcaid combined or 0.1% of

. social security was 2.6% of gdp. discretionary spending was 11.5% of gdp. today, medicare and medicaid are 5.6% of gdp. social security is 4.9% of gdp. discretionary expenditures have shrunk to 6.5% of gdp. why is that important? because transfer payments are really consumption and you don't get that much return on your investment. i want to highlight the blue line. back in the 1960's, investments actually used to be higher than transfer payments. they were 32% and they've gone down to 15%. for the republicans in the audience, if there are any in i want to remind you that government spending can be a lot more effective than what

some of you have been putting out in the press. what did you get for this blue line? you got the internet. you got gps. you got the interstate highway system. and we got nih grants that have moved the needle dramatically on cancer and other diseases. what has been going on for the better part of 50 years is the amount of money we are spending on transfer payments, primarily to seniors, has been crowding out investments in our future. it is not just investments in things that brought us the internet and gps. it has been at the expense of children. this chart is pretty remarkable. what you are looking at is the per capita spending on children and on the elderly as a percentage of the average worker's salary per capita.

in 2011, 50 six cents of every dollar made went toward expenditure payments on the elderly, but only eight cents went on our children. just as they've been crowding out other investments, the greater allotment we've been making toward payments for things like medicare, medicaid for the elderly, we also have medicaid for children, but it doesn't move the needle much, and social security, has been at the expense of money we might be spending on our younger generation. this is kind of sad, but i will work around it. the chart you are supposed to be seeing is the united states poverty rate by age group. what you see in red, back then, president johnson declared a war

on poverty. since then, the poverty rate for seniors has dropped to 30% -- from 30% to 9%. i think we can agree that is a wonderful accomplishment. there's nothing worse than thinking of an elderly person who is poor and can't make it in society. but the interesting thing is, during that same time period, the poverty rate for children -- maybe we have it -- how clever. this is what happens when you are over 60. you don't know how to use technology. the poverty rate for children has been in an uptrend. it is pretty much flat to up, but we have made no progress in the last 40 years even though the war on poverty has been declared a success. it has all been for the elderly, and for children, the poverty rate hasn't dropped at all.

we now have a child poverty rate in this country of 24%. almost one in four of every child in america grows up under the poverty level. to show you how horrific that is, what we've done here is taking the 35 leading economic countries in the world. here's the united states. 23%ank 34th with our poverty rate for children. the only country we beat out is romania. we are worse than latvia and the other 33 countries. wealth are with all this , with all the things we have, and we have the second highest child poverty rate. one in four children in america are growing up in poverty. we've got this fancy thing again now. ok. i showed you on the first chart

how much we've been spending on our seniors and on transfer payments relative to investment. that 40 to 50 years of spending more and more and giving more to the elderly has resulted in. this is a little complicated, but i think i can deal with it. what you are looking at is, if you take the average net worth of age groups in 1983 versus their average net worth in 2010 in constant dollars, and for the first time in the history of america, we have a generation now where their net worth in 2010 was actually less than their net worth in 1983. that is your 29 to 37-year-old group. a 29-year-old in 2010 is worth ins than a 29-year-old was 1983. but look at the elderly.

with the most extreme case being 74 and over, not only is their net worth not less than it was in 1983, it is 150% more. for all the elderly, their net has gone up dramatically. all a result of the first chart. as we continue to spend more on the elderly at the expense of the rest of our society. so far, i've only talked about the size of the economic pie, and more of that i -- i'm sorry, the proportion of how the pie is split up, more and more has gone to the elderly. there is to be a lot more of the elderly and a lot less of the working force to support those elderly. we had a birth rate in this country of 3.7 to one. 1957d more babies born in

with 100 million less people than we have today. it is pretty incredible. 165 million people in the country and in the last 15 years, we've never had as many babies born. ,his was called the baby boom after soldiers came back from world war ii. 1947 to 1967, they did their business with their wives. a lot of babies were created. we had a baby boom. for those of you who can add, 1947 plus 65 equals 2012. in 2012, the baby boom for the next 20 years he comes a gray boom. for the next 16 years, every day, 11,000 people are going to turn seniors. we are creating 11,000 seniors every day for the next 16 years.

we are only creating 2000 young adult workers a day to support those seniors. nextyou have is, over the 25 years, the people that are actually working to support the retired elderly, they are going to grow by 17%, but the elderly are going to grow 102%. it gets even hairier if you look inside the numbers. the over 85 contingent is going to grow by 322%. why does that matter? on,use as longer life goes the more we spend on our elderly and the health care system. the average 85-year-old, we spend two times what we do on the average 66-year-old. we've been shifting more of the pie to the elderly. there are about to be a lot more of the elderly versus the rest of society to support them and

they are living a lot longer, and the longer they live, the more they spend each year and this is going to cause financial problems. up, but itut a chart is so horrifying, i just thought i would talk about it rather than put the chart up itself. if you take what we've promised our seniors in terms of social security, medicare, and medicaid projections, what we've promised versus the tax revenues we've projected, you get a number which we call the fiscal gap. the american government uses very interesting accounting. how many people here are 65 or over? maybe you don't want to admit it. ok. i would assume you think you are going to get your social security check next month. according to the federal government, that is probably not going to happen.

in their accounting system, they don't account for the fact that anybody over 65 is going to get any payments going forward. that is not considered a liability on their balance sheet. there's not a corporation in america, maybe enron, who does their accounting that way. the way the government accounting works is, the payments the seniors are going to get, they don't exist, and if they did exist and you put it on the balance sheet and took the present value of that cap, according to an economist from university of massachusetts, the present value of that gap would make our current debt, $18 trillion by most accounts, would make it $205 trillion. i don't know whether this is science. all i know is 205 is a lot more than 18. you see the problem. let me just wrap this up in a

nutshell for you. if you look at what we've promised current seniors and you look at the size of the fiscal gap, there's not going to be any money left over for future seniors. that is the young people in the audience. people might think i'm against medicare and social security. actually i love social security and medicare. the problem is, i love them so much i think the younger people in this room should be able to get them to do. this is not young versus old. this is smoothing out the generational transfer from current seniors to future seniors. that is what we are here to talk about. i realize 30 or 40 years seems like a long way down the road and this is not something we should be worried about, but i take heart from your generation and their thoughts on climate change, because that is 30 or 40

years down the road. timeis another ticking bomb. i'm hoping maybe i can get a movement started in the greatest movement starting place in the world, berkeley, california. thank you. we're going to have our conversation now. [applause] mr. brady: that was great, and i think that sets the stage. it also gives new meaning to the old vulcan phrase, "live long and prosper," and it looks like some people will and others may not. that is the concern we have. it is not even just the case that we are worried that young people eventually won't get social security and medicare. we are also worried that as very as government agencies including the federal government, but also states and

localities, as they try to meet these obligations for pensions, medicare, social security, that is going to elbow aside other investments that are necessary for the next generation to succeed. geoffrey canada is the guy trying really hard to make sure we do invest in our children. i want to start by talking about why that is so important. first, what the problem is, what the investments look like, and what we should be doing about it. jeffrey, tell us a little about what the problems are. i think that as i think about this issue, it is really clear to me that the was talking stan about, one in four children in america growing up in poverty, is a disaster. all of the research about what it means to actually be in poverty, when it starts, which

is literally at birth, that you begin to see changes in these young children who have done absolutely nothing but be born in the wrong zip code or to parents who often through no fault of their own don't have enough support, that we as a aciety, i think, have created really unsustainable democracy. you can't continue this and expect that we are going to remain a democracy. i think it is a crisis. i've spent my entire life trying to prove that poor children, if they have serious investments in them, can end up entering the labor market and being successful. that sounds like a funny thing to say i've been trying to prove it, but a bunch of people did not believe that was true. when they thought about poverty, they said, there's nothing you

can do about it. there are things that work. proving that is really important. the one reason people should understand that, after all of our, and we have been partners in this, we've actually now got kids going to middle school, high school, college, graduating from college, being very successful. the point of the effort was to make sure those young people had a piece of the american dream. stan and i grew up in the same time. 1960's, i've the always believed in conspiracies. that might shock those of you here in berkeley, but here's where this whole thing got time together for me for the first time. i was in graduate school and someone began to talk to me about social security and life expense and see -- life

expectancy, and blacks, their life expectancy wasn't long enough for them to collect social security. i said, of course. here's another. happy to seeecame black life expectancy increase, then i got stan's charts. it looked like they got is again. i'm going to tell you why you shouldn't laugh about this. , he makes his money from understanding things that most people ignore, which i respect. quite a while ago, he showed me similar data about housing in the united states. he laid this data out and

pointed not just to the year, but to the month our economy was going to become undone. i'm looking at this, saying, america wouldn't let this happen. this would destroy the united states. we talked about it and decided we would go to washington together and say to people who should care about this, you are about to destroy this country. just destroy it completely. they did nothing. the crisisatched unfold, which we are still living through today, and i learned a funny lesson. you should listen to stan. those charts -- you have to understand, as clear as this data is, the data on housing was that clear, and no one did anything about it. that for my kids,

our kids that we've invested all this time and energy, that we are not going to allow them to get ripped off. i'm part of the baby boomer generation. my generation quite honestly, they care what is left 30 or 40 years from now, and i think that is a disaster. all of this has come together for me. these are kids that we wanted to break into generational poverty. we know what will happen to these kids if my generation takes all the money. and by the way, what stan didn't show you, some of the charts about discretionary spending and how that has strength -- when you look at something like what , you begin toint say, how can an american city not only have children being poisoned in front of our eyes,

but nobody doing anything about it, and people acting like we can't find the resources to fix this? by the way, flint is not even the worst place in michigan for lead poisoning. there are 22 other communities that are even worse. this is going on all over the country. when it comes to the policymakers, they simply say we don't have the resources. to do with state pensions and what is happening to state budgets and city budgets. there's also this other entitlement issue. i think that it is disgraceful for us not to do the kind of investments in our kids that give them the same opportunities that stan and i had growing up. that is how i got tied up in this issue. mr. brady: let's outline some of the ways we might be under investing. let's just, between the two of you, what kind of areas are we talking about? butave a property problem,

where are we under investing? mr. canada: when you start thinking about medical supports for young people, educational supports for young people, and what is happening with school budgets across the country, and while i'm the first one to argue answer to is not the failing schools, i will also say it does take money to educate. does take money to actually educate kids. we are not prepared to do it. we think about food scarcity. we think about kids growing up exposed to environmental toxins. the asthma, the other diseases. i think that health, social services -- by the way, one of the things that we are becoming very clear about is young people growing up in poverty have lots of symptoms of mental health

problems that simply aren't being treated at all. -- it usedink about to always frustrate me, what happens when there's a shooting in an upper middle-class community, one of those horrible shootings. the first thing everybody talks about, how all the mental health services are going to be there. these shootings are every day and we do absolutely nothing. no one since any mental health to any of those kids. if you are growing up underneath that kind of stress, which we know when we send soldiers overseas, they are exposed to a year or two years of violence, the posttraumatic stress, what happens for decades afterwards, you have kids growing up with this. at least as a soldier you get to come back home. that is home. why aren't we providing any mental health services to our young people? i think employment is an area,

youth employment, that we under invest. one of the things that disturbs me the most, stan and i were talking to some folks who were visiting. we get a lot of kids to stick with our program for years because we have great arts, of whatand other kinds i would call high engagement activities for our young people. you name it. we are providing that to kids. when you are poor, that is seen as a luxury. in most places, a luxury we can't afford. when you are not poor, you consider that essential for your own kid. it is another area that i think we have massive underinvestment. mr. brady: stan, do you have other things you would add? mr. druckenmiller: i would amplify the health comment. as the sequester was unfolding,

both sides of the aisle were not going to balance the budget on the back of our seniors. so they cut infrastructure spending. that is often michigan is. we're talking about infrastructure problem. memorial on the border for 25 years. we didn't even know really what caused cancer until about six years ago and how it happened. massive breakthroughs. we can genetically sequence drugs. now, we are having our nih grants cut at sloan-kettering to do cancer research. so much crowding out. f mentioned the other main problems. hillary talked about medicaid for children and the effect on toxic stress and other things on kids. you saw it. they are getting eight cents and

the elderly are getting $.56. can we at least make it 12 or something? give them a little bit of the pie. frankly, to invest in a 5, 6, 3-year-old, to me, the payoff is a lot bigger than to invest in an 85-year-old. i may feel differently in 23 years. those are the major issues i would highlight. mr. canada: the only other thing i would say, it is the sort of underinvestment that we've done in higher education for young people. -- stanually had folks and i were having this conversation, say a college education doesn't pay when you have to borrow huge amounts of money and there's no guarantee that you're going to earn enough money to pay back the bills. some folks are thinking, maybe these kids shouldn't get a

college education. is, maybe it shouldn't be so expensive for a poor k id to go to school that we think maybe they shouldn't go to school. that is a challenge. something that we should put at the top of the priority list. my generation, there were schools you could go to that you could afford when you were poor. when i was in college, this was one of those places. city college was free. in new york city, not one dime did you have to pay to go to city college. there was this idea that education was the great equalizer and you shouldn't have wealth determine whether you had a shot. i think that is a real challenge. there are a lot of kids thinking, i can't afford college or i can't afford the loans to get through college. i think that is not the kind of i believeat stan and

you should have. we shouldn't be leaving that to our children and grandchildren. mr. brady: we have a really good question here. why can't we expect the economic pie instead of trying to carve out the one we have in place? is that just saying we should reallocate money from will able to young people -- from old people to young people or is there something else going on? mr. druckenmiller: i don't know who asked, but if you cut investments and put all the money in expenditures into consumption, the economic pie will shrink over the long term. the first thing we can do is start investing in our kids and investing in productive things, not paying people like me who is a billionaire. i don't want to get into my ideas on expanding the economy,

because everybody has different question, there is no and i think both sides of the aisle would agree, if you keep spending money on transfer payments and consumption and you cut education and cut investing in your infrastructure, your economic growth will unequivocally be slower. mr. brady: so in fact, what you are proposing is, let's invest because everybody will be better off. mr. druckenmiller: this is not just about fairness and equity. it is not just about that. it is about growing our economy and making it more productive. mr. brady: back to the harlem children's zone. tell us what you see with individuals there are you invest in and what the results are. where do they start from and where do they end up? mr. canada: for the folks who care about the research, the

research on us is probably the most definitive in terms of some of the real hard outcomes. i began this initiative, if you were in my office and i was trying to raise money from you all, which i told it soan i wouldn't do -- happens you stumbled into harlem, i would show you a chart of the incarceration rate in my zone. i would show you manhattan and i would show you what is happening in my 100 blocks. it, afterey calculate a certain number, it becomes red. the harlem children's zone looks like one red sort of area. that has been going on all over america. these kinds of communities, we are spending huge amounts of incarcerationt on

, which in new york state is $60,000 a year, but here's a number you need to keep in mind. if you go to new york city jail, o estimates. the low estimate is $115,000. is $160,000timate year. when i think about what we have been doing in these communities, it has basically been just a black hole for tax dollars. unemployment is sky high. folks aren't working. folks aren't contributing. we are paying not just for incarceration, for special education -- it goes on and on. right now, our college graduation rates are not just higher than blacks in this country and latinos in this country, it is higher than whites in this country right now. need, if you you

really want to fight poverty, you've got to get the kids out there and give them a shot. i think that it's not only the education, but the latest data talks about incarceration, which is almost zero, and teen pregnancy, one of the best teen pregnancy programs in the nation when you look at the difference between kids in the zone and kids outside. on each one of these indicators, i think this is really just trying to take our kids who are at the bottom and get those kids back into the middle so they have some opportunity to become middle-class citizens. [applause] mr. brady: so what can we do to make sure the communities are investing in the future in this way?

that leads to the larger question of, how did we get to a situation where so much spending goes toward the elderly and why isn't there more for young people? what are the political issues that need to be overcome? mr. druckenmiller: it started with very good intentions. chart in the mid-1960's when medicaid and medicare came on. we spend nothing and those are great programs. social security is a great program. but if you want to get into the raw politics of it, there's an organization called the aarp which represents the elderly. i started getting notices when i was 50. literally, every month -- you did too? i can't wait until i'm 65 to collect. just kidding. it is an unbelievably strong lobby. to be frank, the elderly vote.

first of all, children can't vote, but more importantly, the young don't vote. for whatever reason, dean brady, the young have not focused on this issue, but the elderly are focused because it is directly affecting their pocketbook. the young are having trouble focusing on something 20 or 30 years out. i think that is the raw politics of it. the politicians cater to it. the thing i would add is that when you begin to talk to people -- there is a belief that these investments that were made simply didn't produce any results. folks believe that we had a war on poverty and we lost. , and i one of the things know a lot of the researchers are coming out of the goldman school, one of the things that folks are demonstrating is that you do get a return. sometimes it is not as quick as you would think.

sometimes it takes longer to sort of see what those investments turn up, but when i go on capitol hill, which if you really want to see your government work, go to capitol hill and try and argue on the merits of science. you will be extremely disappointed. they will think differently if stan comes with me because maybe that i will give me some money. i'm just coming in with problems. when you talk about this, they do not believe in many cases that these problems have solution. there is empirical that this is a sound investment. the degree we continue to have our social scientists pile on the evidence, it will have to

be done in a sophisticated enough way that it meets a skeptical audience. say, is pushed back to there are investments in you can make that actually do pay up and you get a real return on the investment. example?ther >> the investment in early childhood to has been clear. increasingly we are finding that to any of these sort of strategies that reduced poverty has paid off although folks did not believe it did. i think now there is a lot of research saying the ability of families to get key services helped mental health and employment chaining, i think it really does pay off. the evidence is clear. there is increasing evidence

place, right?n a when we decided to work in our 100 blocks, there was not a lot of evidence of this idea that if you improve these physical and other opportunities in that area, it would bradley, i think, allow children to do better. ishink that evidence becoming more and more clear. that place matters. we should not have places where there is a sense of despair and no hope the place will get better. that is becoming clear, that this place-based strategy, there is evidence this works. affects brain development from the get-go. that has been proven. affects development from the get-go. that has been proven. you can invest in those areas to reduce those.

little will tell you a bit more about the sense of despair because i don't think many people understand what it is like to be in these communities. >> at the very beginning, and if you came to harlem today you would have not a clue what i was talking about. we have pictures to show people of what the community looked like. it was a disaster. it looked like a bombed out place after a war had happened. people had to get used to their children going up there. you do not. you do not get used to that. would you rather be here are would you rather be -- everybody wants to be in the nice place. it is not like kids do not know that they are growing up in a place where kids do not make it out of those places. i was speaking to a young man, samuel, he was talking about growing up in in environment in how it was just normal for kids to go out and get involved in

hustling. different, but all the same stuff. something illegal to make enough money. not that you ever get rich or can retire, but enough money you can take care of necessities today and maybe tomorrow. when that becomes the culture in a place, when that is what the expectation is, it goes with a lowered the leaf that you're going to live. right? it's who are 14 or 15 who do not believe they are going to use -- see 20 come are going to do risk your things. it is easier for girls to not care if they get pregnant. they do not believe they have a future. there is nothing waiting for saying sort of, you are getting out of this place. despair is infectious. you catch it. i got it, you got it, and these places have names that people give them that suggest this is

one of those places you do not get out of. and harlem was certainly one of those places. but, this is what we learned. hope is also infectious. when people begin to see -- first of all, when we said we were going to change the conditions, you know how many different entities have come into harlem singh there been a change of? everybody's eyes roll. yeah, you are going to change it. but when people actually began to see the change, at first we had to convince people to work with us. then people began to come to us and say, can you come on my block and help us with this? that is the sense of having a delete. i will give you one more example. ilan was the kind of place that if the kids ended up at a place like this, they might get on the front page of time magazine. right? a big story, kid makes it out of the hood.

if you ask somebody when we first started, do you know if you're going to college? they would say, i think this girl on 1/17 street, maybe she is in college. they thought you had to be a college. go to stanley and i helped 149 kids in college. when they come home for spring break, you know what it is like to be eight-years-old in a place where you have 900 kids from your community in college? you ask them, and you believe you are going to college? they will be light, he is in college! [applause] is what changes what the norm is. if the norm is no one goes, you would say, that is normal why would i go? to me, that what is in college explanation -- that person is in college! i can go to.

even if you are checked right now, even if you are in a house where you mom has mental issues, you are in drugs, maybe your brother is in jail. you see a path out of this that does not involve you risking your life over risking imprisonment. you see examples of it. you see, there is hope right here. that kind of sense of opportunity, i think, is what has made america great, and in these places, we've got to bring that sense back to these communities. >> let's just talk about a few

things people have mentioned. presidential candidates are telling us the issue is immigration and if we stopped immigration, we would solve the problem. how do you think about immigration? is it a problem for america? can it be a solution for america? >> i think all of us are the product of immigration. this country is built on immigration. with regards to this specific issue, immigration is a huge help. you bring in more population, and you've got more suckers to pay for the older people. this is the way the system works. when you pay a payroll tax if you are working, it's not going to you. you are paying for somebody who worked 40 years ago. it's a minor point, but immigration with regard to this issue is a help, not a hurt. immigration in general, this country was built on immigration. there's not a candidate out there when somebody in their family at some point didn't immigrate. it's just ridiculous. [applause] geoffrey: we see this differently in new york city. when you see the energy, the economic energy that all of these immigrants bring into the city, i don't think anyone thinks, that's a bad thing we

see going on as folks try to figure out what their niche is to climb the american dream. when you look at countries that have failed totally to bring new people into their communities -- if we think about japan, as that group grows older, they are not able to sustain the populace. you have a problem. this thing has consequences. i think right now immigrants are a scapegoat for the fact that we have had, you know, a problem growing and sustaining our middle class in america. that is not an immigration problem. it's a real problem, and i think it's an easy way to find a scapegoat and say, they are the reason this is happening, if we stopped all of them from coming in. suddenly, we would have all of

these jobs appearing back. i think this is one of the more horrid kinds of conversations we have had in this country for quite a while. it reminds me of a time when it villainize others, african-americans, anyone who grew up in the 1960's. people were disparaging of that group. this sounds a lot like that to me. i think it is a real problem that we haven't addressed fully. >> here's another solution. lift the cap on capital gains, and we will have enough money to solve the problem. true or false? stanley: i happen to think they should normalize capital gains and dividends, and it will bring some money.

i think it will be helpful, but it's just a pittance in terms of solving the problem. the funny thing about capital gains tying it to this issue, the average 60 year old has five times the net worth of the average 30-year-old. taxing old people and rich people at a lower rate than the 30-year-old plumber is a direct transfer of wealth, again, from the young to the old. i don't think that is why it was intended. i have invested in businesses for the better part of 40 years. i started a business, and this idea that somebody sitting around collecting dividends and clipping coupons is some kind of great job creator relative to some guy out there working, i think, is a joke. you are talking to somebody who thinks they should raise or normalize capital gains and dividends, not give them preferential treatment, but it won't solve the problem. it will give you some money, but it won't solve the problem.

>> that is one of the complexities, the magnitudes of the amounts of money we are talking about. stanley: let's talk about the defense budget. the defense budget is $700 billion. it's a lot of money, and i don't think that is equal to three years of the growth in entitlements coming up. if you took defense spending to zero, you wouldn't make up for three years in the upcoming growth in entitlements. should we have a defense budget greater than the 18 countries in the world combined? that is what the equal to. probably not. you could find a way to cut a little of the defense budget, but i will say, they already cut it.

defense used to be 6% of gdp. it's going to be 0.5% of gdp. you can cut a little defense spending, but these are tiny snippets compared to the big problem. if you want to get at the big problem, you are to have to means test social security. you are going to have to means test medicare. since they have already gotten so much of the pie, i don't have a problem with stopping the coolers. it's not like they haven't already increased their share already. five and seven-year-olds are suffering because of the expenditures we could be using for their future. >> i've got questions hear from students. how do we start a movement? stanley: that's why i'm here. that is their job. >> what are the levers? what should we focus on? how can we get young people to understand this, and how can we avoid a war of all against all? we don't want young people against seniors. that is not the goal. stanley: that is absolutely not the goal. the first thing to do is to

start voting. [applause] stanley: i would make this issue a priority. i talk to young people. i have daughters in their early 20's. i was thrilled when gay marriage went through for a couple reasons. i thought it was great, and i thought maybe they could move onto another issue now that that problem was solved. i got a two-fer when that happened. if you look at the charts i put up there and you are willing to think about your future, this is a big deal. one thing i know about young people, when they show in force and vote on an issue and are loud about it, like they were on gay rights and like they have been on climate, politicians eventually listen. they've got to vote, or politicians won't give a damn. >> the voting rates of young people are about half of people

65 and older. politicians are not stupid. they know who votes, and they are going to focus on the needs and concerns of those who vote. stanley: i don't want to put this as young versus old. i really don't. one of the things i want to do is talk about seniors and future seniors. one of the things i want to do is preserve these programs so they are viable for our young people when they are 65. that's all. >> let's talk more about the harlem children's. what would you like to see, if you had a way of expanding it around the country? what kind of investments do we need in our cities, and it's mostly the cities, along the lines of what you have pioneered? geoffrey: when president obama decided to replicate our work and create promise neighborhoods, if you look at his original announcement before he was president, he talked about putting billions of dollars, which was a very modest

sum. if you look at what he was able to get through the congress, it was relatively small. it was much less than any of us thought was sufficient to get the job done. i think that the big lift moving forward is to do a couple things. we are doing good work, but there are other folks around the country doing good work, also. we need to celebrate that work. when of the challenges was, they said it couldn't be done. you couldn't eliminate generational poverty in an area and get kids who weren't going to college to go to college. people began to say, ok, ok, you can do it, but you are the only one who can do it, which is absolutely not true.

this idea that we need to do not a minor investment in kids but to actually put real dollars in there, i think it's worth fighting for. there are folks who are continuing give evidence that these programs matter. i think that is one part. politicians will look at the evidence and say, great, thank you very much. this issue -- stan has certainly been a major player -- i will tell you an issue where i learned from the guys stand used to work for, george soros. george is very much on the left wing of the democratic party. stanley: he is to the left of berkeley. geoffrey: when governor pataki, a republican, was governor, i

have been trying to convince both republicans and democrats to do some investment and youth development -- in youth development and to look at the mandatory minimum sentences before stuff came up about incarceration rates. i was an organizer and an activist, and people knew me. i was yelling and marching, and we got nothing. george called for a meeting with pataki, which was that george's office. george is a democrat. pataki is a republican. i am in the meeting. the meeting is at george's office per george shows up to the meeting 15 minutes late. i was like, how is this going to work? does not apologize. he doesn't say, "i'm sorry i'm late." he sits down and says, i want three things. pataki gives him two out of three, not because they shared

any political beliefs, but simply because pataki thought, it's probably not a good idea to upset a billionaire. power matters. here i had been an activist yelling, screaming, marching. how you think about with the power levers are to move public policy is something we need to focus on. right now, we have a real crisis in this country. you see it in the electorate. i think the establishment and realize they had a crisis, but people are starting to realize they have a crisis. what i firmly believe is that there will be an opportunity to talk to folks who would never listen to you before and say, there's an answer to what is making everybody so angry, and we have the research to back up why this would be a good political investment.

by the way, it's going to cost some money to get this stuff done. until we can get folks to realize, there is money in that budget that we could free up to do some of this stuff, i think we are going to continue to think we are a country of scarcity. nothing could be further from the truth. this is a matter of whether or not we are going to do the investment. i am kind of a foolish optimist in the midst of this, but i actually think there's going to be an opportunity to have some of these conversations. this time, we've got a lot more evidence, scientific evidence, of what works. >> that is a heck of a note to end on. we thank you for your optimism. we appreciate it given the presidential campaign we are all watching right now. i just want to end by saying, these are two remarkable people, and i feel honored that they came across country to be with us to tell us what they are thinking about, and i think what is quite remarkable is that they come from quite different places, do quite different

things, and yet have come together with a concern for this issue. i think that's wonderful, and i think it's indicative of the kind of creativity that exists in america to try to solve problems. i think the harlem children's zone is solving problems, and i hope we can work at berkeley and around the country to solve the issues we discussed today with respect to the future investment in young people to make sure that we create a future for them that is worthy for them in am erica. thank you for coming. thank you so much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

[indistinct chatter] >> the wisconsin primary is this week and a pariah the polls show ted cruz with a slight lead over donald trump. senator cruz will campaign today. we will have the event live at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span.

announcer: campaign 2016 continues on tuesday, april 5 with the wisconsin primary. live coverage begins tuesday night. tune in for election results, candidate speakers at and viewer reaction. we take you to the action on c-span, c-span radio, and c-span.org. coming up next on c-span, high school students from the united states senate youth program discuss their recent visit to washington, d.c.. and followed by at washington journal at 7:00 a.m. live. tune in and ask your questions. ♪ >> this week on "q&a," a discussion with high school students attending the united states senate youth program.

the students talked about their participation in the week long government program and their plans for the future. brian lamb: gives me her name, place and where you are from. what are we doing here in this ballroom today? >> we are going to talk about our experiences we have had over the past week, visiting many important places in the nation pose a capital and listening to our leaders. brian lamb: your name? >> i am alex young and i am also from indiana. brian lamb: what have you been doing this week? >> we have been talking to guest speakers from different departments of our bureaucracy and the president of the supreme court justice, but i think the most important part of this week was to interact with our fellow delegates from the 50 states and washington dc and japan, south korea.

the interaction i have had with my fellow delegates, whether it is talking about politics or what we had for breakfast, was probably the best part of this weekend. these are things i will remember for a long time. brian lamb: any disagreements? >> disagreements for sure. [laughter] whether i like pineapple or not, disagreements another policies and then a nice handshake and a great into the discussion. brian lamb: what is this program called? >> the united states youth program. brian lamb: who supports it? >> the hearst foundation. brian lamb: how do you get chosen? >> there is a particular process for each state. each state selects to delegates based on their application essays that they write in their resume. brian lamb: why don't we move around and find out what is on the rest of your minds, and i would start by asking the question after this week, who has impressed you the most and why? if we get some hands, why don't wetart right here.

standup please and give me your name and where you are from. >> i am meredith mccain and i am from atlanta, georgia. brian lamb: who is it that you are most impressed by? >> oh yes. [laughter] >> that is a difficult one, but journalist, washington post journalist, jonathan capehart came to talk to us and i really loved the insight he gave us about being the outside source, reporting back to us in the electorate about whais going on in our government. and, he really told us to look out for our guardian angels and those who guide us along our journey as we enter into public service. brian lamb: what is your own goal, where are you going to go in life? >> i would love to be in international journalists or be part of the foreign service and eventually an ambassador to a french-speaking country, but something from a global point of view that can incorporate lots of different people and government leaders like the journalist has had in his career.

brian lamb: let's go find somebody. yes, sir. please stand up and give a short name and where you are from. >> i am walter jackson from north carolina. i would like to say my most memorable moment would be going to the white house and meeting the president, and the best part was just watching him come down the hallway because you always see that on television but to actually see it in person was pretty incredible. brian lamb: what did you notice in person that you do not see on television? >> he looked a little thinner. [laughter] >> than he does on television, but just to be in a president's presents no matter if you agree with his policy or not, it is really incredible. he is tall. his ears look the same. [laughter] >> it was an incredible experience and i'm grateful to the hearst foundation. brian lamb: what year do you plan to run for president? >> i do not know. [laughter] brian lamb: there is hope there. yes, where are you from?

i want you to stand around so they can see you over there. >> wonderful. i am from massachusetts. brian lamb: who impressed you the most? >> i really enjoyed the senator from hawaii because she came up from an immigrant family, growing up tough, it was really inspirational to hear what she had to say, how we can learn from her message amd her years in public service were inspirational for us all. my parents moved here in the 1980's and i grew up here. from southern it india. brian lamb: what is your observation from it being around all of these young people, the difference between being an immigrant and having been born in this country with ancestors from european countries? >> there is a lot of racial diversity here and it is great to see like these different

types of perspectives depending upon where you grew up, and your type of economic background you came from, because the hearst foundation provided all of the money for us, travel expenses, hotel room in, that was all covered, meaning that people from various economic backgrounds are able to come here, so there is a lot of different perspectives when you get here and i really enjoyed learning from everyone. brian lamb: somebody told me you got a surprise announcement earlier in the week about your scholarship, what was it? >> originally, everyone here thought the scholarship would be $5,000, which is phenomenal. but then on sunday night, they announced it would actually be double to $10,000. the loudest applause i had ever heard erupting in the room. [applause] brian lamb: who else wants to tell us about this week, if you have somebody you want to talk about? your name? >> i am from new hampshire. brian lamb: who is it you want to tell us about? >> jeffrey hearst gave us a

speech about technology and its influence in the media. especially in the past 20 years. i enjoyed his insightful speech because it talked about how we have created our own sort of safe spaces online where we have information we agree with coming to us but we do not hear a lot from the other side because of the way the algorithms work on social media. brian lamb: do you stick with your side? >> i am trying to find different people on twitter so that i hear from both sides. and so the following people that agree with me, i am starting to get more information on the other side. brian lamb: anybody from over here have somebody want to tell us about? yes, ma'am. where are you from? >> i am from wyoming. for me, ruth bader ginsburg was the most inspirational person we have met this week. she has been one of my idols for a long time. i either want to be in the legal

profession or possibly a senator, but she has done such amazing work to advance women's rights and women going into the legal system. so, it was really an honor to get to speak with her. brian lamb: what did she say that you will most remember? >> she talked a lot about the influences of different supreme court justices, and sort of their legacies, and so i guess it makes you think about what you want your legacy to be even if you are not a supreme court justice. but just how impactful some , other decisions have been and that if i one day become a lawyer, i will want to put to